Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

In the 1970s, Safari Club International asked the federal government to approve its import of 1,125 not-yet-killed trophies of 40 endangered species, including gorillas, orangutans and tigers, according to the Humane Society of the United States.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Both climate change and extinction are results of our tyranny over the nonhuman world and our domination of, and exploitation of, whole categories of each other - and those, in turn, are clearly linked to agriculture, the cattle-industrial complex, capitalism.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

For almost two centuries, American gray wolves, vilified in fact as well as fiction, were the victims of vicious government extermination programs. By the time the Endangered Species Act was passed in 1973, only a few hundred of these once-great predators were left in the lower 48 states.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

On climate change, we have only a handful of years to make massive changes, according to the scientists. The politicians have to act, and only the people can make them, because Royal Dutch Shell's not going to do it.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

I advise, if you're stymied by a passage or paragraph or plot point - whether it's for an assignment from the outside world or one that comes only from within - get up from wherever you're sitting, walk outdoors, and do nothing but look at the sky for five minutes. Just stare at that thing. Then execute a small bow and go back in.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Trophy hunters are not Everyman. These world-traveling endangered-species shooters are a far cry from the hunters who spend weekends in the American outback near their suburban or rural homes.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

It seems to me that the time for subtlety in our American life has passed.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Wyoming, home to Yellowstone National Park and the Grand Tetons, is also the country's largest coal producer and one of its largest gas drillers. Two-thirds of the state's gas-drilling rigs are on public lands in the increasingly industrialized Greater Green River Basin.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

I'm not calculating enough in the way I approach writing.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Without elephants, Africa's landscape would be unrecognizable, yet these animals have fallen by the hundreds of thousands as a result of two enormous waves of poaching in this century - one in the 1970s and 1980s, the other, beginning around 2009, now underway.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Historically, grizzlies ranged from Alaska to Mexico, with at least 50,000 bears living in the western half of the contiguous United States. With European colonization, the bears were shot, poisoned, and trapped to the brink of extinction.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Without even knowing why, we believe that to learn how to be human - which we have many years to do, for human beings have longer childhoods than any other species, a feature that to biologists and philosophers alike is one of our race's distinguishing characteristics - children must be surrounded by animal imagery.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Pugs are creatures of habit.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Children depend mightily on animals for comfort, inspiration, imagination, and art. And parents have long recognized this.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

I don't like names that are clever or made-up sounding.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Economic and health statistics, as well as police-violence statistics, shed light on the pressures on American Indian communities and individuals: Indian youths have the highest suicide rate of any United States ethnic group.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

The grizzly bears that live in and around Yellowstone make up almost half the population in the lower 48 states, and now those bears are at risk.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

Snark describes a cynical position, and I'm not interested in that.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

When I was 16, I went to Berlin - West Berlin, since at that time a wall still divided the city - to live for three months with a family on an exchange program.

Lydia Millet
Lydia Millet

At 16, I was more resilient and easygoing than I am now.