The Andromeda Strain is the first book and movie I remember hearing the name Michael Crichton. One of the last times I heard him was a speech to the Commonwealth Club of California; you can find the speech here:
https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~kw/crichton.html
Here is a quote: "I want to argue that it is now time for us to make a major shift in our thinking about the environment, similar to the shift that occurred around the first Earth Day in 1970, when this awareness was first heightened. But this time around, we need to get environmentalism out of the sphere of religion. We need to stop the mythic fantasies, and we need to stop the doomsday predictions. We need to start doing hard science instead. "
