In 2001, environmental writer Susan Zakin was burned out. Traveling to Madagascar, the world's fourth-largest island, to see a place where humans had arrived only two thousand years before, the frustration and anger she'd experienced in the environmental debates roiling the American West dropped away. Waiting for Charlie traces her journeys over the next decade, exploring places where nature still flourishes in the midst of failed states, meeting a new generation of Africans taking on their continent's most pressing causes, and revealing humankind's oldest terrain not as the past, but as a sometimes hopeful, sometimes chilling, vision of the future.