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New York Harbor is a sprawling network of tidal bays, inlets, channels, and creeks set within both the broader Hudson Estuary and the urban matrix of New York City. Its geography is recent in geological time—the product of glaciers that receded only fifteen thousand years ago. Many natural habitats may be found in the Harbor, from freshwater and brackish wetlands, to boulder and bedrock shores, to sand beaches. Its annual temperature range is extreme, resulting in a dynamic biota that changes seasonally.

This chapter presents a detailed account of the changing interface between water and land in Chennai. It traces the complex interweaving of human and environmental forces that form the urban ecological setting for housing, eviction, and the re-housing of the city's urban poor. Considering the changing fate of one wetland marked for conservation in a more affluent neighbourhood and another consigned to support slum formation in the poor outskirts of the city, the chapter shows how slums are part of the city's infrastructure, even as the city – with all its middle class aspirations and urban wealth, is inextricably dependant on the labor of the urban poor.

Explores Indian women’s involvement in environmentally shaping the agrarian landscape of the almost-thousand-mile-long Ohio River valley. Women planted their crops in riverway bottomlands and produced a surplus food supply that encouraged trade with nearby and distant villages. An extensive trading network preceded European arrival. Extensive cornfields, bountiful vegetable gardens, and fruit orchards characterized Indian villages along the Ohio’s tributary rivers. Indigenous women developed a stable, continuous cropping system that maintained the organic matter in the soils by not plowing, and this provided long-range village stability. Environmental abundance in the Ohio River valley sustained high population levels. Rivers and streams teemed with more than a hundred varieties of fish; lakes abounded with wildlife and 250 species of mussels. Villages were strategically located within landscape niches that ensured sedentism and increased village size. These niches, or openings, provided access to adjacent, fertile fields, rich wetlands with nutritional plants, and forests that supplied meat and furs. Numerous bison, elk, and deer herds populated the region. Wetlands food sources were breadbaskets, and even small wetland patches produced high yields of food resources.