Tyrone O'Shaughnessy Tierwater is a suburban drudge and manager of an antiquated shopping centre in New York. His life is changed completely by his marriage to Andrea, a well-known environmental activist. Moving to California, Tyrone takes up the life of the environmental firebrand himself, and is eventually forced to go underground by the law.
Flashing forwards to 2025, Tyrone is now an old man eking out a living as the manager of a pop-star's private menagerie, holding some of the last surviving animals in this part of the world - for rhinos and elephants are now extinct as global warming has resulted in meteorological cataclysms.
And then there's Sierra, Tyrone's step-daughter, who spends more than three years sitting several hundred feet up in a redwood tree . . .
