What compels you to write about nature in your novels?

I've always been writing about Charles Darwin and our relation to the environment. My first book was called Descent of Man, after Darwin's book. But yes, more and more, I seem to focus on the environment in fiction.

How do you humanise environmental issues?

How I do anything is inexplicable. I awake and I find a computer and I get into a little dream every day, and then I communicate that dream to you. But I am very conscious in my mind that art and politics and advocacy do not mix. Art is entertainment, it is a seduction; it is meant, in the case of novels, to make the reader enter another world and dwell in it freely, and make his or her own determinations. So I do not consider this political. Yes, I am concerned with certain issues, but I am equally concerned with not forcing anything on the reader.

You set When the Killing's Done on islands off California. Why there?

I wanted to explore them. They're part of a national park now, but they were privately owned until the late 1980s. The book is based on instances over the past ten years - turf wars among the national park and the nature conservancy, and animal rights advocates and people who feel that they alone know how to treat the natural world. But we are part of the natural world, and we have no control over it, no matter how hard we try.

Is that partly your intention - to show how nature is more powerful than us?

When I go up to my mountains, there is the mountain lion. We are close to the bears. It's very exciting to me to know that there's something alive in nature other than us, and while there are no more unexplored places on earth, there are places - like these islands or these mountains - where I can be alone and not see anybody. To me, that is vitally important.

Are we too detached from nature?

I find it sad that a large portion of our fellow human beings have no experience of nature. I think of city-dwellers, for instance, who know nature only in terms of the ginkgo tree, or pigeons or rats, and who have never had the experience of being alone in a wild place. We are animals. We're meant to be alone in a wild place.

Is solitude crucial to your writing?

Yes, it is. I travel all the time with my books; I'm performing constantly. I need to tap the other side of myself. I'm lucky to be able to have both. Society is so crazy and machine-obsessed, there seems to be little time or experience of contemplation, of sitting and staring at something, of getting deep inside yourself in a book.

Is there a different quality of thought you achieve when you're alone?

Oh, of course. In order to read a novel, you must get in the same unconscious frame of mind that the author did in order to write it. That is, each reader re-creating the scenario and picturing everything in his or her own mind. Which requires the habit of contemplative time. As a scientist - you don't know that part of me - I'm working on a ray that will neutralise all TV transmissions throughout the world for ever.

Do you want to disable the internet, too?

I'm not addicted in the way that many people are. I don't understand why people spend all day and night staring into a screen. I like to remember that machines are supposed to be something we use as a tool to aid us, rather than something that dominates us.

To take a walk along the beach with headphones on is missing the point. Maybe I'm crazy and this is an antiquated view of the world, but I think everyone would be a little happier if they could go out on to the beach without earphones and listen to the surf and the gulls. We've created the virtual world just in time, because all large mammals as we know them will be extinct in a generation.

Is our fate as bleak as that, in your view?

If you read environmental writers and scientists, they don't express a lot of hope for the continuation of our species, certainly not in the form that we've grown up with. We are destroying everything that is beautiful. I can only see this getting worse. Which is why I write fiction, in order to meditate on these things. I don't have the answers. l

Interview by Sophie Elmhirst

T C Boyle's "When the Killing's Done" is published by Bloomsbury (£18.99)