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The introduction to Toni Morrison and the Natural World: An Ecology of Color maintains that African American literature, from its inception, has been steeped in environmental concerns and places Morrison’s work inside of that tradition. It also establishes the theoretical scaffolding of the book, namely material ecocriticism, which holds that human geographies are enmeshed with nonhuman nature. In Morrison’s body of work, the natural world emerges as a site of history, narrative, and memory. Color theory is another theoretical lens brought to bear in this study. Each chapter of the book is organized by color which brings to the fore the constellation of race and the natural world.

This chapter presents a Humboldtian history of mountaineering in the long nineteenth century and reviews the scientific progress and aesthetic reverence that became available through the embodied experience of the mountaineer. It mentions scholars Christophe Bonneuil and Jean-Baptiste Fressoz who defined the central premise of Anthropocene as challenges that were formerly deemed fundamental to the modern West. It also looks into Stacy Alaimo's observation of transcorporeal interchanges, which considers climbing mountains as a creative and performative undertaking. The chapter deals with recent theories of material ecocriticism that conceptualize mountaineering as an intimate exchange between the human and more-than-human world. It also emphasizes how mountaineering can become a creative act of perceiving the world with one's hands and feet.

Gemini is the most geographical or spatial of Tournier’s novels. Natural occurrences like weather and tides, and spaces shaped by humans, like gardens and landfills, are key “characters” in the novel. Tides illustrate the double meaning of temps (time and weather), and the intertidal creatures that suffer through low tide are a metaphor for all marginals, especially the disabled and homosexual characters of Gemini. Gardens prove the intimate bond between humans and humus, from the lush gardens of Tunisia to the geothermal gardens of Iceland, to the tiny perfection of the Japanese miniature garden. Finally, towering landfills, alive with rats and gulls, present an infernal mirror of our consumer society, a malignant inversion of homo economicus into homo detritus.

In Globalia and Le Parfum d’Adam J.-C. Rufin explores what could go wrong with the environmentalist movement, if it were co-opted by unwise or greedy leaders. Globalia is the sole country in a dystopian world governed according to the principles of deep ecology: vegetarianism, strict protection of forests and animals, and zero population growth. It is a sterile, climate-controlled world, covered by domes. “Non-zones” outside the domes are homes to mobsters, warring tribes, and resistants. They constitute a feared outside enemy which serves to unite most Globalians in support of their totalitarian government. This novel echoes Alexis de Tocqueville’s fear that a “tyranny of the majority” might someday rule the United States. Le Parfum d’Adam is a thriller about ecoterrorists who, obsessed by the deep ecology principle that world population must decrease, plot to contaminate the water system of a huge favela of Rio de Janeiro. They believe that poor people—too busy surviving to think about ecology—are destroying the planet.