This work is a collection of essays that brings ecocritical studies into a dialogue with postcolonial literature, it offers ways to explore the relationship between humans and nature around the globe, drawing from texts from Africa and the Caribbean, as well as the Pacific Islands and South Asia. Turning to contemporary works by both well- and little-known postcolonial writers, the diverse contributions highlight the literary imagination as crucial to representing what Eduoard Glissant calls the "aesthetics of the earth." The essays are organized around a group of thematic concerns that engage culture and cultivation, arboriculture and deforestation, the lives of animals, and the relationship between the military and the tourist industry. With chapters that address works by J. M. Coetzee, Kiran Desai, Derek Walcott, Alejo Carpentier, Zakes Mda, and many others, the book makes a contribution to rethinking the role of the humanities in addressing global environmental issues. It's features include: The overlooked Caribbean, Latin American, African and South Asian scholars and activists who have contributed to global environmentalism and a sense of place in literary production ; Focuses on an eclectic group of writers from across the globe that includes Coetzee, Zakes Mda, and Derek Walcott ; Demonstrates the postcolonial's long-standing concern with environmentalism.

Toward an aesthetics of the Earth -- Cultivating Place -- Cultivating community: counterlandscaping in Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss / Jill Didur --Haiti's elusive paradise / LeGrace Benson --Toward a Caribbean ecopoetics: Derek Walcott's language of plants / Elaine Savory -- Forest Fictions -- Deforestation and the yearning for lost landscapes in Caribbean literatures / Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert -- The postcolonial ecology of the new world baroque: Alejo Carpentier's The Lost Steps / George B. Handley -- Forest fictions and ecological crises: reading the politics of survival in Mahasweta Devi's "Dhowli" / Jennifer Wenzel -- The Lives of (Nonhuman) Animals -- Stranger in the eco-village: Environmental time, race, and ecologies of looking / Rob Nixon -- What the whales would tell us: cetacean communication in novels by Witi Ihimaera, Linda Hogan, Zakes Mda, and Amitav Ghosh / Jonathan Steinwand -- Compassion commodification, and The Lives of Animals: J.M. Coetzee's recent fiction / Allison Carruth -- "Tomorrow there will be more of us" : toxic postcoloniality in Animal's People / Pablo Mukherjee -- Militourism -- Heliotropes: solar ecologies and Pacific radiations / Elizabeth DeLoughrey -- Activating voice, body, and place: Kanaka Maoli and Maohi writings for Kahoolawe and Moruroa / Dina El Dessouky -- "Out of this great tragedy will come a world class tourism destination" : disaster, ecology, and a post-tsunami tourism development in Sri Lanka / Anthony Carrigan -- In place: tourism, cosmopolitan bioregionalism, and Zakes Mda's The Heart of Redness / Byron Caminero-Santangelo.