In 2001, environmental writer Susan Zakin was burned out. Traveling to Madagascar, the world's fourth-largest island, to see a place where humans had arrived only two thousand years before, the frustration and anger she'd experienced in the environmental debates roiling the American West dropped away....

While many may argue whether the devastation of hurricane Katrina was the direct or indirect result of global warming, infrastructural neglect, inadequate preparation, or an incompetent governmental response, nobody will deny the heartbreak it wrought, the homes, businesses, and history washed away, the landscape uprooted, or the lives lost....