Investigative journalist Jake Bennet, mired in a personal bereavement, works with Sydney’s tribal youth to reclaim flooded ancestral grounds. Fighting the inertia of a parochial 4th estate still in denial of climate change, despite a flooded coastal Sydney in rising seas, it’s his ability to condense complex science, corporate greed and environmental injustice into palatable storytelling that wins him a prestigious commission, ushering a professional comeback to explore the global ramifications of Australia’s carbon footprint, a subject traditionally redacted from mainstream news.

His first jaunt, interviewing a fugitive Canberra politician holed up in Miami who sets his Jewish mafia mob onto Jake when the questions get tough. Amber, his Lebanese camerawoman persuades him to focus on the tribal; a red herring report ensues - the aftermath of Osage fracturing in Oklahoma ends in funerary mayhem embellished by man-made earthquakes.  A valuable insight into tribalism gone awry, one that counters Amberine’s claim for tribal solutions to ecological disasters. The story becomes Jake’s Achilles heel, jeopardizing his contract with his Sydney editor.  In NYC, an Aussie tweenage climate activist’s deposition at the UN turns her parental custody battle into Jake’s problem when he assumes temporary custody while escorting her to the ICJ in The Hague, where she is the plaintiff bringing an agrochemical conglomerate to justice.

Something has hit Jake’s gut. Two women have insinuated themselves into his life. Promising a speedy re-union, Amberine delivers their Osage story to her editor in Doha while Jake, Avery in tow, follows Australia’s hazmat trail from Perth to Helsinki, delivered onto Italy’s Mezzogiorno burning fields. A Zurich scoop on a Melbourne reinsurance fraud finds Jake’s interviewee Head of Flood’s body floating in the river. Avery insists on corralling young Italian farmers burnt by glyphosates into protest, but the cancer ward scenes in hospitals around Nola’s poisoned lands are more horrific, victims of the same poisons decimating mine-displaced communities in Western Australia.  A cathartic moment with his deceased partner’s grandparents in Naples becomes a stigmata moment for Avery, who’s futile resistance to her warring parents return order sees her leaving, promising a speedy return into Jake’s life.

Jake’s obsession with cataloguing the elements, sand, seeds, water, do not cloud his motives to visit the Middle East; a desert’s worth of Aussie sand has built the planet’s tallest towers, scoring Australia’s deepest carbon footprint. A moment of bliss with his adored colleague, Amberine, their sweet intense short-lived fling is abruptly soured when they dig deeper into the sand story; a Bedouin investigative reporter, and worse, a camerawoman, are red flags for the sheik’s security phalanx; Amberine is arrested. Jake is deported from the same Gulf State. Both the status of his report and the plausibility of his newly germinated tribe are now in question.  Licking his wounds in Thailand, reporting the “stranded assets” of an Aussie gold mine poisoning villagers. Meanwhile his commissioning editor’s board of directors are threatening to fire him and ditch the story. Finally there is news of Amberine’s conditional release; she has since gone off the radar.