I get a lot of calls from crazy people.  Well, to be fair they’re not all crazy.  In fact, most are sincere.  People simply desperate and asking for help.  Some want to save a single ancient tree on their main street, others are aware of a grand conspiracy (real & imagined), some are working on a movie script, college paper or novel.  If I can, I always try to take the time to listen and provide whatever guidance, assistance or perspective I can.  I do this largely for two reasons.  First, I can still recall what it was like to be new to Washington, DC and looking for my first job as an “environmentalist”.  Looking back I must have seemed crazy to a lot of people too, but I remember who took the time to help me think through the issues and clarifying my thinking.  I am grateful to them.  Second, you never know if someone is really rich and perhaps they’ll give Greenpeace a bunch of money if we don’t blow them off when they need help.  We don’t take money from corporations or governments, so every bit helps!

I remember when David Klass called me the first time: another guy writing a book.  In the madness of my typical day, I had completely forgotten that Karen Sack, our intrepid and brilliant Oceans campaigner, had told me to expect his call.  Karen had worked with David on his book “Firestorm”.  So I’m listening to David and thinking “so, you want me to tell you how to destroy the Amazon rainforest?”  …this guy better be rich.

Eventually I did put two and two together and David and I talked at length.  David was now working on “Whirlwind”, the second in his “The Caretaker” trilogy.  You see, in David’s series people have been sent back in time to either save or destroy the Earth.  There’s a war going on and what we do to the Earth today will have big implications on who wins.

Over the next few months he’d call out of the blue with a question or two.  It was kind of fun.  Although it had been a while, I have spent considerable time in the Amazon both in Brazil and Peru.  I’m also fortunate enough to have learned from the master, Paulo Adario, my Greenpeace counterpart in Brazil.  I’ve spent months on the rivers and I’ve flown over the region for hours and hours in a Cessna.  Especially from the air, the Amazon seems too big, too green, too lush and impossible for humanity to destroy.  Then you fly for hours and hours over fields with no forest in sight and you’re told that all that too was once intact rainforest.  Sadly, it can … and is, being destroyed.

One great misconception of the Amazon is that it’s empty of people.  Especially along the rivers-- the dominant mode of transportation, once you leave terra firma (dry land) in the eastern part and explore the vast western regions--you can’t go far without finding people living along the river’s edge.  There are 20 million people that call the Amazon their home.  This said, to be clear there are still enormously vast wilderness regions and numerous indigenous groups who have had no contact with the outside world.  This is one reason we can’t “save the Amazon” without taking into consideration the complex dynamic of social and economic issues … but I digress.   I’m supposed to be talking about David’s 2nd book, “Whirlwind”.

So anyway, I do know a thing or two about the Amazon and apparently just enough to make me dangerous in the mind of David Klass.  In our conversations, I soon found myself reverse engineering the Greenpeace forest campaign and every other positive environmental, social or economic initiative that I was aware of.  Apparently, I was typecast as the bad guy so I gave David my two-cents describing how to release the hounds of hell to destroy as much as possible of what I love. Like I said, it was fun ... in a weird, twisted kind of way.  I took comfort in the fact that, to the best of my knowledge, time travelers with quasi-omnipotent powers, don’t really exist … and besides Karen had told me that this guys Klass was a real author (thus, not sent back from the future to destroy the Amazon and shatter my career.) Still, it was a relief the other week when the book arrived in my office and I confirmed that David was not actually himself from the Dark Army of the future.  I really would have felt like a tool if he was.

So I’ve now read the book.  My kids (three and five) are still too young, … I think it’s a “t’ween” audience, but I personally thought it was great.  Perhaps I’m just a fan of the genre or maybe my wife is right when she tells me that I have the mind of an adolescent. Regardless, I concur with The New York Times Book review when it equated Whirlwind to Grand Theft Auto meets Al Gore.  It’s a fun read with an important environmental message.

How much I actually influenced David is, of course, up to debate ... although that bit in chapter 49 about the candiru fish is straight out of my nightmares and the subject still freaks me out to this day.  If the book sells as well as his first, I will of course tell my kids that it was all me.  If, on the other hand, David is actually an evil agent from the future I hereby disavow having ever talked to the man let alone had any influence.
 

- Scott