Ty Tierwater seems to be a combination of Theodore Kaczynski and yourself.

[Chuckles] Yeah, I guess he has a lot of me in him. I wasn't thinking of Kaczynski exactly. More, I was thinking of some of the people from Earth First! who really pioneered [Edward] Abbey's idea of "monkey wrenching" in the '80s and '90s. But Kaczynski certainly was part of this ecological fringe, wasn't he? A seriously disturbed mental individual, but his ideas about going back to nature and destroying the technological machine have a lot of sympathy among many people, including me -- although, like Ty, I'm addicted to my machines too, and I'm just a criminal and enemy of the environment in many ways, even while I love it and want to save it. We're all, in the Western world, suffering from these contradictions. And that's another reason why I've written "A Friend of the Earth."

Like your character Sierra Tierwater says, "Everything's a compromise" -- isn't it?

Yeah, I guess so. I like to have electricity. I like to drive a car. I like to go to the grocery store and find food there, rather than have to go out into the wilderness and find it under rocks. I wonder when enough is enough, though. And I wonder when there [will be] enough of us big apes that we not only destroy all of the other creatures but destroy ourselves as well.

Have you ever had the urge to destroy any heavy machinery yourself?

Oh, you bet I have! I am outraged when I go into the national forest of the sequoias and see clear-cutting going on. I could, of course, plead the Fifth here, so as not to incriminate myself. But, in fact, I am an artist; I am not a rabble-rouser or a politician of any stripe. And I've never belonged to any kind of group.

So I haven't done acts of "ecotage" (aside from, maybe, stealing a clear-cutting sign and putting it up on my wall). And I have mixed feelings about people who do. While I subscribe to cutting back on raping the environment, I wonder if anybody can put themselves above the law for an ideal. While I subscribe to a degree to what the eco-saboteurs do, just as self-righteously someone could defend shooting abortion doctors, because God speaks to them and they don't have to obey the laws of the country or even the individual rights of a given woman, because God has made them vigilantes of a higher cause. So I think there are dangers in saying that you're above the law, no matter how reasonable your cause seems.

What did you think of Julia "Butterfly" Hill [who protested logging by occupying a redwood tree for more than two years]?

I was already writing this book when Julia went up her tree, and she was certainly an inspiration to me. Sierra Tierwater, Ty and Andrea's daughter, who goes up that very tree, was certainly inspired by Julia Hill. But there were also many other tree sitters and tree spikers and so on who inspired me.

But Julia was up the tree while I was writing the book, and, in fact, I finished the book before she came down. In my version, my tree sitter, Sierra, stays up in the tree for three years. I had no idea how long Julia would actually stay up there. She might have stayed up still to this day; she might have been there for 25 years. I hoped that she would be, actually. She's like the mad saint of the movement. I think it's wonderful.

Sierra, however, for the purposes of my fiction, came down a lot more precipitately and less gracefully than Julia "Butterfly" Hill, unfortunately.

In "A Friend of the Earth," you have the weather wreak havoc with one of the blights on the landscape of the Western United States: condos.

We've got to have an image for the great future, and for me it's the condo. Where are we going to put all these people? Well, we're going to put 'em in condos. And there's going to be nothing left of woods or nature or animals. The oceans are depleted, and this is a true fact: The oceans will be depleted utterly within a decade or so. Read [Carl Safina's] "Song for the Blue Ocean" and you will weep.

Condos are it. We'll be living in condos and drinking our locally brewed sake. The rain will be lashing at the windows. Mold will be growing on everything. We will be bereft of almost all animals. And we'll be on the Internet. In some ways, the Internet is a great boon, because we need virtual reality -- since there will be no more nature for us animals to live in.

I don't think the human race is going to go on much longer in its current manifestation, that is, this kind of society. I don't think everyone will be wiped out by the pandemic that will get us first; there will be a lot of dislocation and wars, too, because of the changing of the environment. But I think it's inevitable that when an animal species has overbred to the point we have, there are natural curbs on that animal species -- and they're coming, and I don't think there's anything we can do about it.

It sounds pretty cold. And it's also kind of cold to talk about all those useless people out there, those billions. Each one is an individual, and a great and beautiful creation.

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