“As a composer, I believe that the best gift I can offer our troubled world is music. Some composers choose to address the political issues of their times directly in their music. But, although I’ve been politically active all my life, the heart of my music lies elsewhere—again, in the Earth. In order to renew human culture, we sometimes need to step outside of culture, to remember that we are only a small part of the larger order of things. Although my work is in culture, I search for my music at the intersection of human imagination and what we call “nature,” which is the ultimate source of everything that we are as individuals, as societies, and as a species.”