All humans are essentially wild creatures and hate confinement. We need what is wild, and we thrill to it, our wildness bubbling over with an anarchic joie de vivre. We glint when the wild light shines. The more suffocatingly enclosed we are - tamed by television, controlled by mortgages and bureaucracy - the louder our wild genes scream in aggression, anger and depression.

All definitions of wilderness that exclude people seem to me to be false. African 'wilderness' areas are racist because indigenous people are being cleared out of them so white people can go on holiday there.

Society understands the architecture of academia and knows there are relevant qualifications in different fields, and the media accepts the idea of specialisations and accords greater respect to those with greater expertise. With one exception: climate science.

I don't write quickly, and I don't want to.

The silencing of the rainforests is a double deforestation, not only of trees but a deforestation of the mind's music, medicine and knowledge.

Human language is lit with animal life: we play cats-cradle or have hare-brained ideas; we speak of badgering, or outfoxing someone; to squirrel something away and to ferret it out.

As a writer you have a duty to be a messenger.