how do I, in my lifetime, do my part to help return the species to itself?

For a serious writer seriously concerned about any moral, social, political, environmental issues, it is a major concern. I’ve been wrestling with it ever since I was 18.

I certainly want to continue trying to understand how the global environment functions. The earth as a system is a very complicated one. And to understand it, we need very many disciplines, very many different scientists working together. I want to continue working with my specialty, which is chemistry, with the atmosphere. There is still much to learn about chemical reactions that occur out there in the air, in the atmosphere. So one of my projects now is to really learn more about this pollution that occurs in cities and that is spreading more through the globe. To learn it in enough detail so we can better tackle it, we can better come up with new ways of using energy, for example, that are not so damaging to the environment.

I think it’s probably a natural, adversarial position between a commissioner in any sport and their players association, or union. I was very concerned about this problem. I wanted to be sure that we were clean, so I set up a testing program. Their union took it to arbitration, and got it softened a great deal. So now I will be criticized in the future for drug incidents, yet I was unable to execute a testing program that could stop it.

Well, don’t you think that we are all like that? I mean in some ways the deepest fear for a lot of people is getting to the end of their life and think that they did it wrong.

It was probably before my career, I had an accident when I was younger, I fell down a mountain, it was a little bit ridiculous but, I slipped unprepared on the ice. It was probably one of the few times where was sure that I was about to die.

I think I’m most proud of the speed record on Moonlight, because I broke a team record by myself by climbing it in a different style. It feels more “new” to me than simply climbing a route a little quicker, which is what all my other speed records are.

Oh, I don’t know. I mean, like, just like, I don’t know, environmental propaganda or something. Or like the meat stuff. I’m like pretty stoked on all the vegetarian type of stuff now, just because it’s such an easy way to minimize your impact on the planet. And it’s just, you know, I mean, it just solves so many different environmental issues. But I don’t know.

I mean, definitely my van.

Yeah. I, I think an interesting thing with that is that like, is it even failure if you've learned from it and you've taken those lessons onto your next project or the next thing that you're working on? And it's like, that's not necessarily a failure. It's all just part of a long-term learning process.