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It is the year 2025, and Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater is eking out a bleak living in Southern California, managing a pop star's private menagerie of the species "only a mother could love" - scruffy hyenas, jackals, warthogs and three down-at-the-mouth lions. Global warming is a reality. The biosphere has collapsed in a grim but pointed way, and most of the major mammalian species - not to mention fish, birds and frogs - are extinct.
At one time, as we see in alternating chapters, Ty was a passionate environmentalist, so committed to saving the earth that he became an eco-terrorist and, ultimately, a convicted felon. As a member of the radical environmental group Earth Forever!, he unwittingly endangered both his wife, Andrea, and his daugther, Sierra (who herself became an icon of the Movement as an inveterate tree-sitter in the late nineties). Now, when he's just trying to survive in a world torn by obdurate storms and winnowing drought, Andrea comes back into his life.
