Zeigler’s long-awaited third environmental thriller is finally here (summer 2020). Rare as Earth finds Jake Goddard and Susan Brand once again battling dirty government and business dealings in a rush to rescue fourteen-year-old, Amanda Fry and her mother, Melissa Fry, both of whom have been assaulted and abducted.
The action in Rare as Earth opens in central Pennsylvania in the heart of the environmentally disastrous latter day “gold rush” called hydraulic fracturing or fracking. Then it shifts to Utah where the focus becomes the reduction of Bears Ears National Monument and the extraction of rare earth metals.
Rare as Earth, like its predecessors, The Straw That Broke, and Some Say Fire is climate fiction at its finest showcasing climate change as well as young warriors for the planet like Greta Thunberg.
In 2013 Zeigler captured a crisis in the Colorado River Basin (The Straw That Broke). In 2015 he predicted devastating forest fires as a result of drought caused by climate change (Some Say Fire).
Now in 2020 in Rare as Earth, Zeigler sets his sights on the deleterious effects from the extractive industries on both human health and the health of the planet. And once again, in Rare as Earth—just as in The Straw That Broke and Some Say Fire, the environmental crisis is the backstory to a classic thriller.
