“Here’s our poster bird,” Lalitha said, taking a brochure from her briefcase.

The warbler on its cover looked nondescript to Katz. Bluish, small, unintelligent. “That’s a bird all right,” he said.

“Just wait,” Lalitha said. “It’s not about the bird. It’s much bigger than that. You have to wait and hear Walter’s vision.”

Vision! Katz was beginning to think that Walter’s real purpose in arranging this meeting had simply been to inflict on him the fact of his being adored by a rather pretty twenty-five-year-old.

The cerulean warbler, Walter said, bred exclusively in mature temperate hardwood forests, with a stronghold in the central Appalachians. There was a particularly healthy population in southern West Virginia, and Vin Haven, with his ties to the nonrenewable energy industry, had seen an opportunity to partner with coal companies to create a very large, permanent private reserve for the warbler and other threatened hardwood species. The coal companies had reason to fear that the warbler would soon be listed under the Endangered Species Act, with potentially deleterious effects on their freedom to cut down forests and blow up mountains. Vin believed that they could be persuaded to help the warbler, to keep the bird off the Threatened list and garner some much-needed good press, as long as they were allowed to continue extracting coal. And this was how Walter had landed the job as executive director of the Trust. In Minnesota, working for the Nature Conservancy, he’d forged good relationships with mining interests, and he was unusually open to constructive engagement with the coal people.

“Mr. Haven interviewed half a dozen other candidates before Walter,” Lalitha said. “Some of them stood up and walked out on him, right in the middle of the interviews. They were so closed-minded and afraid of being criticized! Nobody else but Walter could see the potential for somebody who was willing to take a big risk and not care so much about conventional wisdom.”

Walter grimaced at this compliment, but he was clearly pleased by it. “Those people all had better jobs than I did. They had more to lose.”

“But what kind of environmentalist cares more about saving his job than saving land?”

“Well, a lot of them do, unfortunately. They have families and responsibilities.”

“But so do you!”

“Face it, man, you’re just too excellent,” Katz said, not kindly. He was still holding out hope that Lalitha, when they stood up to leave, would prove to be big in the butt or thick in the thighs.

To help save the cerulean warbler, Walter said, the Trust was aiming to create a hundred-square-mile roadless tract-Haven’s Hundred was its working nickname-in Wyoming County, West Virginia, surrounded by a larger “buffer zone” open to hunting and motorized recreation. To be able to afford both the surface and mineral rights to such a large single parcel, the Trust would first have to permit coal extraction on nearly a third of it, via mountaintop removal. This was the prospect that had scared off the other applicants. Mountaintop removal as currently practiced was ecologically deplorable-ridgetop rock blasted away to expose the underlying seams of coal, surrounding valleys filled with rubble, biologically rich streams obliterated. Walter, however, believed that properly managed reclamation efforts could mitigate far more of the damage than people realized; and the great advantage of fully mined-out land was that nobody would rip it open again.

Katz was remembering that one of the things he’d missed about Walter was good discussion of actual ideas. “But don’t we want to leave the coal underground?” he said. “I thought we hated coal.”

“That’s a longer discussion for another time,” Walter said.

“Walter has some excellent original thoughts on fossil fuels versus nuclear and wind,” Lalitha said.

“Suffice it to say that we’re realistic about coal,” Walter said.

Even more exciting, he continued, was the money the Trust was pouring into South America, where the cerulean warbler, like so many other North American songbirds, spent its winters. The Andean forests were disappearing at a calamitous rate, and for the last two years Walter had been making monthly trips to Colombia, buying up big parcels of land and coordinating with local NGOs that encouraged ecotourism and helped peasants replace their wood-burning stoves with solar and electric heating. A dollar still went fairly far in the southern hemisphere, and the South America half of the Pan-American Warbler Park was already in place.

“Mr. Haven hadn’t planned to do anything in South America,” Lalitha said. “He’d completely neglected that part of the picture until Walter pointed it out to him.”

“Apart from everything else,” Walter said, “I thought there could be some educational benefit in creating a park that spanned two continents. To drive home the fact that everything’s interconnected. We’re eventually hoping to sponsor some smaller reserves along the warbler’s migratory route, in Texas and Mexico.”

“That’s good,” Katz said dully. “That’s a good idea.”

“Really good idea,” Lalitha said, gazing at Walter.

“The thing is,” Walter said, “the land is disappearing so fast that it’s hopeless to wait for governments to do conservation. The problem with governments is they’re elected by majorities that don’t give a shit about biodiversity. Whereas billionaires do tend to care. They’ve got a stake in keeping the planet not entirely fucked, because they and their heirs are going to be the ones with enough money to enjoy the planet. The reason Vin Haven started doing conservation on his ranches in Texas was that he likes to hunt the bigger birds and look at the little ones. Self-interest, yeah, but a total win-win. In terms of locking up habitat to save it from development, it’s a lot easier to turn a few billionaires than to educate American voters who are perfectly happy with their cable and their Xboxes and their broadband.”

“Plus you don’t actually want three hundred million Americans running around your wilderness areas anyway,” Katz said.

“Exactly. It wouldn’t be wilderness anymore.”

“So basically you’re telling me you’ve gone over to the dark side.”

Walter laughed. “That’s right.”

“You need to meet Mr. Haven,” Lalitha said to Katz. “He’s really an interesting character.”

“Being friends with George and Dick would seem to tell me everything I need to know.”

“No, Richard, it doesn’t,” she said. “It doesn’t tell you everything.”

Her charming pronunciation of the O in “no” made Katz want to keep contradicting her. “And the guy’s a hunter,” he said. “He probably even hunts with Dick, right?”

“As a matter of fact, he does hunt with Dick sometimes,” Walter said. “But the Havens eat what they kill, and they manage their land for wildlife. The hunting is not the problem. The Bushes aren’t the problem, either. When Vin comes to town, he goes to the White House to watch Longhorns games, and at halftime he works on Laura. He’s got her interested in seabirds in Hawaii. I think we’re going to see some action there soon. The Bush connection per se is not the problem.”

“So what is the problem?” Katz said.

Walter and Lalitha exchanged uneasy glances.

“Well, there are several,” Walter said. “Money is one of them. Given how much we’re pouring into South America, it would really have helped to get some public funding in West Virginia. And the mountaintop-removal issue turns out to be a real tar baby. The local grassroots groups have all demonized the coal industry and especially MTR.”

“MTR is mountaintop removal,” Lalitha said.

“The New York Times gives Bush-Cheney a total free pass on Iraq but keeps running these fucking editorials about the evils of MTR,” Walter said. “Nobody state, federal, or private wants to touch a project that involves sacrificing mountain ridges and displacing poor families from their ancestral homes. They don’t want to hear about forest reclamation, they don’t want to hear about sustainable green jobs. Wyoming County is very, very empty-the total number of families directly impacted by our plan is less than two hundred. But the whole thing gets turned into evil corporations versus the helpless common man.”