Jonathan Miles

Yeah, we could probably figure it out.

It's the story of a one-time jazz clarinetist and fourth-grade teacher whose life has been gutted by a grievous loss, and it's

After Effects.

And, you know, what he's seeking when we meet him is what used to be called respare.

It's an archaic term for recovery from despair or the resumption of hope.

And he notices a job listing advertising an opportunity to, quote, save the world and decides that maybe that's his path to respare.

The saving the world actually turns out to be a very tiny speck of the world, a remote uninhabited island in the Pacific called Santa Flora.

And more than a century ago, whalers dumped goats on the island as a way of stashing protein for their, you know, fresh protein for their return voyages.

Of course, the whalers disappeared, but the goats did not.

And in the intervening years, they disappeared.

nibbled the once verdant island down to scrawny shrubs, thereby endangering a host of endemic bird, plant, and reptile species.

So the job that Adi accepts is to remove the goats from the island and restore it to its Edenic state.

So this idea was seeded about 20 years ago.

I was a magazine journalist for years and I was on assignment in the Galapagos Islands embedded with the Ecuadorian Navy on their patrols against illegal shark fishing in the islands.

And while I was there, I happened to hear about goat eradication efforts that were happening on some of the islands there.

And as I described in my fictional island, feral goats had been left on the island and were really ripping up the habitat for the native tortoises that needed the trees for food and shelter.

And so what the government was doing was sending in people with rifles to kill, shoot and kill every goat on the island.

And I found myself

haunted by the moral friction of that.

The friction of a righteous and defensible ecological goal meeting the mass slaughter of another species, you know, taking lives to save lives.