Santa Cruz Island foxes © by Dan Richards/courtesy: The National Park Service

and we kids would run behind the Jeep, ‘cause it was great – there was this big fog cloud. And it also takes the kid, as I had done, to the power plant, where they showed us little movies about Johnny Atom and how safe and wonderful everything was.

There aren’t many energy options that don’t have negative consequences, and that brings to mind a passage in the new book about the guilt we feel for being alive, for needing things, consuming things. All of this is from the character Alma’s perspective as she’s taking a shower. That’s a theme that’s at the heart of this novel, isn’t it? Yes, of course. It’s all kind of hopeless. We’re using up resources. I’m a criminal just by being alive and using up resources in a consumer-oriented culture. But on the other hand, I have a natural yard – the leaves fall, they mulch, I provide a pond for the animals, I’m rigorously recycling everything, and every scrap of food left over goes into a mulch pile. I don’t mean to be exclusively negative. If we could control population, we can begin to try to curb global warming. We can help restore ecosystems. What happened on Santa Cruz Island is a kind of small miracle of restoration.

Well, let’s talk about that miracle. To modify a famous line in A Friend of the Earth, the tagline for When the Killing’s Done could be: In order to be a friend of the earth, you have to be an enemy of the animals. Yes, I like that. It’s a curious irony of this book. Dave LaJoy and Alma Boyd Takesue, the two antagonists here, believe in the same things, essentially. They believe in preserving the environment and preserving wildlife.