After a lifetime of nature shows and magazine photos, we arrive at the woods conditioned to expect splendor - surprised when the parking lot does not contain a snarl of animals attractively mating and killing each other.

I've spent my life living in rural America, some of it in blue state Vermont, some of it in red state upstate New York. They're quite alike in many ways. And quite wonderful. It's important that even in an urbanized and suburbanized country, we continue to take rural America seriously. And the thing that makes Vermont in particular so special, and I hope this book captures some of it, is the basic underlying civility of its political life. That's rooted in the town meeting. Each of the towns in Vermont governs itself.

When you are in a hole, stop digging!

I do a certain amount of work in religious communities on these issues. It's not the central focus of my work but it is certainly an area where I have worked a lot. It has gotten much better over the years, especially over the last couple years. There wasn't a religious environmental movement 15 years ago, but there is now - in the Catholic community, the Jewish community, the mainline Protestant community, and in the Evangelical community.

A voluntary simplification of life-styles is not beyond our abilities, but it is probably outside our desires.

We also have to engage - and I think this is important - in national politics because there is no way to address questions of this scale in the short time that we have to address them without engaging in real political change.

Between [Speaker of the House] Paul Ryan, [Senate Majority Leader] Mitch McConnell, and Donald Trump's team, I don't see a lot of openings for making real progress.