Donovan James Webster (January 13, 1959 – July 4, 2018) was an American journalist, author, film-maker, and humanitarian. A former senior editor for Outside magazine, his work appeared in The New Yorker, National Geographic, Smithsonian, Vanity Fair, Men's Health, Garden & Gun, and The New York Times Magazine, among other publications. He was also an advisory board member of the National Geographic Society, the interim editor of the Virginia Quarterly Review, and a lecturer in the Department of Honors Media Studies at the University of Virginia. He lived outside Charlottesville, Virginia. Life Born in Chicago, Illinois, Webster grew up in Chicago's North Shore community of Wilmette, Illinois. He graduated from New Trier High School and Kenyon College, finishing with a BA in English in 1981, and went on to attend Middlebury College's Breadloaf School of English for MFA graduate school. He then moved to New York City, New York, where he wrote for several magazines, many with the Conde Nast Corporation, where he was soon employed. In 1986, working with friends, he co-founded Southern magazine, which was purchased by Time, Inc. in 1989. After that, he spent several years as senior editor at Outside magazine before going to write full-time. In 1996, following a cover story he wrote in The New York Times Magazine about global land-mine proliferation, he co-founded Physicians Against Landmines/Center for International Rehabilitation (CIR). An international, non-governmental humanitarian organization, CIR sponsors field hospitals, wheelchair and prosthetics programs, plus prosthetics-fabrication training and disability advocacy in post-conflict nations worldwide. In 1997, as an early member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, CIR was a co-recipient of the Nobel Peace Prize. In 2006, working with the United Nations Special Rapporteur for Disabilities, CIR was central to the UN’s Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, the most-rapidly ratified UN Convention to ever gain approval by the UN General Assembly. Webster served as CIR's vice-chairman. In 2005, he ground-reported and co-authored the United Nations report on destruction and disabilities created around the Indian Ocean basin by the 2004 Banda Aceh Tsunami. In 2007, he was co-founder and became President of Tidene/USA: the U.S. arm of the non-governmental humanitarian organization Tidene (which he also co-founded in 2006). Originally a France-based project with offices developed in Washington DC, and Agadez, Niger, Tidene builds water wells for humans, livestock, and agricultural cultivation, as well as schools and hospitals for the Tuareg people