When the Killing's Done | T.C. Boyle | Talks at Google
19Warning: This talk contains mature language.
When the Killing's Done is my thirteenth novel, published by Viking in February of 2011. The novel takes up some of the environmental themes of earlier novels such as A Friend of the Earth and The Tortilla Curtain,and stories like 'Carnal Knowledge,' 'Top of the Food Chain,' 'Tooth and Claw' and a host of others. It is set in the past decade on the California Channel Islands, where a rather testy turf war was fought between animal rights activists and the biologists of the National Park Service and the Nature Conservancy over the elimination of non-native species of plants and animals, and this provided the inspiration for the book. In fact, I still preserve a yellowing newspaper headline from six or seven years ago (it's pinned beneath a magnet on the refrigerator door), which reads: EAGLES ARRIVE AS PIGS ARE KILLED, a reference to the reintroduction of the bald eagle and the eradication of the feral pig. In my telling, the animal rights activists, led by Dave La Joy, a local businessman, and his folksinger inamorata, Anise Reed, are opposed to the taking of life under any circumstances, while the more practical people of the Park Service, under the direction of the biologist Alma Boyd Takesue, favor elimination of the aliens in the interest of preserving the native species. Thus, for instance, the rats which prey on native ground-nesting birds must go, as must the sheep and feral pigs, which denude the hillsides. What this all amounts to is a series of dramatic confrontations between those who say nay and those who say yea, but, as readers will I hope discover, such distinctions become increasingly more complex and ethically challenging. Just how precious is any given life - and who gets to decide?
T.C. Boyle visits Google's San Francisco offices.
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