It's the technique, I think, of writing a novel that is difficult for a nonfiction writer.

In some ways, I had a traditional 'old South' upbringing, meaning that I spent some time in a military school, and acquired an inoculum of the military ethic that is still with me today: honor, duty, loyalty.

Far more important throughout the rest of science is the ability to form concepts, during which the researcher conjures images and processes by intuition.

I had reached a point in my career in which I was ready to try something new in my writing, and the idea of a novel has always been in the back of my mind.

In many environments, take away the ants and there would be partial collapses in many of the land ecosystems.

No one knows the diversity in the world, not even to the nearest order of magnitude. ... We don't know for sure how many species there are, where they can be found or how fast they're disappearing. It's like having astronomy without knowing where the stars are.

Perhaps the time has come to cease calling it the 'environmentalist' view, as though it were a lobbying effort outside the mainstream of human activity, and to start calling it the real-world view.