I have held a variety of jobs, including stints as a fisheries policy analyst at the National Marine Fisheries Service, a program manager at the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, an environmental consultant stateside and in London, an American Association for the Advancement of Science writing fellow at Business Week, a curatorial assistant in the Mollusk Department at Harvard’s Museum of Comparative Zoology, and an intern at the National Wildlife Federation, the Massachusetts Office of Coastal Zone Management, and the U.S. Senate.

Throughout my career, one thing remained constant—I enjoyed writing and telling stories (in addition to books, I have written more than 60 articles for magazines, newspapers, and professional journals). Around 2002, I told my wife I wanted to be a fulltime writer. After she stopped laughing, she said, okay, if you can earn a certain amount of money, you can quit your day job. It took me another five years to meet that threshold, and now writing is my job. How long my career as a writer is going to last, I don’t know; but I hope it lasts forever, and that I keep discovering interesting stories to tell.