Well, get used to it. The only people who would deny that we are in a period of global warming like no other our species has ever experienced are the few remaining shills for the oil companies. People don't seem to understand what global warming is: As the temperature rises, there's evaporation; and water vapor is the biggest greenhouse gas, so it's an unending cycle. The more water vapor in the air, the less stable the weather patterns are. And so we have these 100-year floods every day, it seems.

You can see I've had a lot of fun with that notion in terms of, for instance, the California wineries that are all out of business because they're flooded out and they can only grow rice now.

That was one of the funny aspects of the book: Everybody's drinking microbrew sake.

I like sake actually, but I'm making fun of it anyway, because most people hate it. I did a gig in a bar the other night in Minneapolis. It was wonderful: Cover charge, I'm the opening act, they've got a band playing later. The people there had read the book and liked it, and they had a big bottle of sake. So we had a little sake on the rocks to toast the end of the world.

What do you hope to be doing when the world ends -- if it happens during your lifetime?

I'm not a prophet of doom. I'm just trying to sort out my own feelings on the subject, just as with "The Tortilla Curtain." How do I feel? I don't know. I need to write fictions in order to know how I feel about things.

I'll answer your question in a roundabout way. One of the books I read -- even before I started to think about this book -- five, six years ago, was Paul Kennedy's "Preparing for the Twenty-First Century." It was an overview of geopolitics in the coming century, the century we are now in. I remember one reviewer writing, "The overall view is so utterly depressing, most of us reviewers are happy we'll be dead by the time this comes to the fore."

I'm very deeply concerned. And when I'm very deeply concerned, I tend to try to set the concerns into a story with characters, set them in operation, put them against impossible tasks and have fun with the misery that they suffer as a result. Fans of my work will not be surprised to find that's the way "A Friend of the Earth" works.

In "The Tortilla Curtain," the totem animal was the coyote. If you could say there's one for this book, it would be the hyena.

Indeed, yes. As I've been announcing to audiences around the country, I can't really recall a great American or English novel that has "hyena" in the first sentence. Maybe there is one, but certainly "A Friend of the Earth" has "hyena" in the first sentence.

For those who haven't read the book, the hero, Ty Tierwater -- a baby boomer who is now 75 in the year 2025 after his third prison term, where he's been locked up for being an ecoterrorist -- is working as an animal man, managing the menagerie of a fading rock 'n' roll star, Maclovio Pulchris, who has a big estate in the Santa Ynez Valley, where he has a menagerie of some of the last of the major mammal species on Earth. But they're not the ones that you would think of as needing preservation -- not the cute gazelles and so on -- but the animals, as Maclovio says, "only a mother could love": the hyenas and the warthogs and peccaries and the pangolins and those sorts of animals. Obviously, my idea is that all creatures are valuable because we can't foresee what their place in the ecosystem is.

There was a little, minor debate going on the other day on a call-in talk show, where one of these right-wing nutballs called up and was saying, "I'd kill off this and that creature -- and the environmentalists, too!" And then we got onto the idea of mosquitoes: "Well, what about mosquitoes?" And this guy, of course, would press the button on mosquitoes worldwide. But an ecologist would say that mosquitoes are essential to the ecosystem.

By the way, I was in Alaska this summer, where you have a fur of [mosquitoes] over your entire body at all times and you actually breathe them. I love them so much that I feel, "Why should I deny them my own flesh and blood?" Actually, I'm only kidding! I'm very quick to slap them. When the ticks and the mosquitoes attack me -- no matter how stealthily -- I always feel them at the moment they start to bite. And then they suffer for it, by God!

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