We should feel an urgency about our environment and what's been done to it by human action and inaction. I wouldn't say there's a resurgence - I think it's been with us all along, and especially since the 1960s and 1970s, but it is true that there's almost a subsection of the bookstore devoted to it now. Personally, I've been addressing these issues in my long and short fiction since the late 1980s - basically since the beginning of my career.

That's how the madness of the world tries to colonize you: from the outside in, forcing you to live in its reality.

What occurs after revelation and paralysis?

It is the nature of the writer to question the validity of his world and yet rely on his senses to describe it. From what other tension can great literature be born?

Nothing that lived and breathed was truly objective—even in a vacuum, even if all that possessed the brain was a self-immolating desire for the truth.

A lot of the creature comforts and the things we take for granted, are not sustainable, especially at current population levels. And so, it's not just simply a matter of changing over to solar. It's a matter of changing our philosophies. Of learning to live, more or less, mid- or post-apocalyptic, whatever apocalyptic means.

I do believe very much in the idea of unexpected or "convulsive" beauty - beauty in the service of liberty.