It's hard not to let criticism make you feel bad about yourself - I do continue to struggle with that as an older woman in the workplace.

I was a simple girl born and raised in Kansas, I grew up with a learning disability. I was a single mum, and I definitely struggled in a male dominated world. But you need to allow yourself those moments to cry.

I'm concerned that we don't address the water pollution problems in other countries. If we move forward and don't clean up the messes of the past, they'll just get swept under the rug.

The issues that most impact the average person are made at the local level.

But now sustainability is such a political category that it's getting more and more difficult to think about it in a serious way. Sustainability has become an ornament.

One of the big questions in the climate change debate: Are humans any smarter than frogs in a pot? If you put a frog in a pot and slowly turn up the heat, it won't jump out. Instead, it will enjoy the nice warm bath until it is cooked to death. We humans seem to be doing pretty much the same thing.

With our evolved busy hands and our evolved busy brains, in an extraordinarily short period of time we've managed to alter the earth with such geologic-forcing effects that we ourselves are forces of nature. Climate change, ocean acidification, the sixth mass extinction of species.

The story seems to be that almost every star has a planetary system... and, also, the definition of 'habitable zone' has expanded. In our system, it used to be that only Mars and Earth were potentially habitable. Now we've got an ocean on Europa... Titan.