We have been on the road for 12 years. It's interesting how your perspective on life changes when you see things firsthand. Anyone can talk or write about the environment or the economy or what people in the US are like, for example, but to see the devastation wrought by mining and agriculture, to see the thousands of gas wells in Wyoming, Colorado, and Utah, to see the low wage labor that makes the nation's economy tick, to see the bleak landscape the Navajo call home, to talk to people, to have small joys in strange places, well these have, taken together, made us feel confident in what we say about this country. I am proud that there are very few descriptions of things we have witnessed or analyses of why things are the way they are that I have had to retract since the book was published.