Thomas A. Lewis is a veteran journalist (National Wildlife, Smithsonian magazines) and broadcaster (Voice of America) who has written six non-fiction books, two of which received favorable critical attention nationwide. He became alarmed about the state of the environment while working as the executive editor of the Time-Life Books 16-volume series on the earth sciences, “Planet Earth,” and later when, as roving editor for National Wildlife Magazine, he traveled from Alaska to Costa Rica to chronicle the distress of animals and their ecosystems. It was while writing “EQ Index,” an annual assessment of the state of the US environment for National Wildlife and The World Almanac, that he began to suspect that pollution and exploitation of natural resources had reached a point of no return. That conviction led to his latest non-fiction work, Brace for Impact: Surviving the Crash of the Industrial Age—and to the present work of fiction, which imagines how that crash might happen, and how an American family might deal with it. He lives on a “sustainable-ready” farm in West Virginia where he has learned, he says, that “if my life depended on sustainable living I’d be dead now.”