Hard to say, exactly. I can trace my current mania to the Nebula Awards weekend 2005, where there was a weird synchronicity of elephants popping up: elephants on an episode of Crocodile Hunter that happened to be on the TV while I was getting ready to head downtown to the hotel, elephant keychains that Mary Anne Mohanraj gave out at a dinner party at her place that night (she had just come back from a trip to Sri Lanka; I think there were elephants on some of the plates as well), and the statue of Ganesh at the Art Institute that I'd visited earlier in the week. For some reason this all seemed significant at the time, and I decided I wanted to write something about elephants. I suspect that this is an awakened mania from my youth. Anyway, I immediately began researching elephants: I read about half a dozen books in quick succession, enough to convince me that the initial idea I'd had for the elephant story wasn't going to work. I also subscribed to some elephant news alerts. Most of the elephant research that I was reading had happened in Kenya (Amboseli, specifically), and there was a lot of news coming out of Kenya about relocating elephants, the change in status of Amboseli itself, etc. Pretty quickly the point was driven home to me that the problems of elephants, as they relate to humans, are both political and economic; too, the arrogance of casual environmentalists (like I was at first) routinely puts the survival of endangered animals above the interests of the people who have them living in their backyards. So the two became more and more connected in my mind, and I don't think I can separate them now. I still have plans to write my elephant novel, but it'll be different from what I envisioned at first, and I want to visit Kenya before I write it.