The environment is becoming so much a central concern, I see environmental concerns just bleeding into poetries all over the place. My hope is that we won't have these environmental poets tucked over here and everybody else doing cool stuff with language and consciousness elsewhere, but that all of it will become one thing.

I'm extremely interested in science as the mythos within which I live. Science tells me what kind of animal I am, what kind of a universe I live in. It's always deepening my understanding of the natural world.

I'm interested in thinking about how are we contributing to the culture, what we can write that might help us deepen the culture, make us more reflective, make us more empathetic, make us feel our connectedness in other ways.

Earth's immune system - its rapid response team of self-protection - becomes invigorated at times of peril. And one sees it at play now in the upwelling of grassroots work aimed at finding a sustainable future.

We're facing enormous changes in our planetary life, with climate change and the adaptations that all natural systems are going to have to make to these climate changes, and so it's extremely important to bear witness to what's happening.

I had wanted for so many years to feel that writing really was at the center of my life, not something I did in my spare time. So the writing and teaching feel in some way to be one thing - the personal engagement and the social engagement good partners.

Writers want recognition, audience, some corroboration that all those hours at the desk and in daydreams add up to something in the esteem of others.