Cities have traditionally been neglected settings in environmental writing and ecologically oriented literary criticism, but have played a central role in the thought and writings of the environmental justice movement. Recently, they have also come into focus as “novel ecosystems” of their own in fiction and nonfiction. This chapter surveys two thematic emphases in environmental literature that portrays cities at risk from either toxicity or climate change, both of which continue to emphasize the antagonism between urban landscapes and the forces of nature by describing cities as either sources or targets of environmental risk. It then focuses on a third and less explored approach to the city as a multispecies community to outline four recurrent templates: the awareness narrative in which individuals or communities discover urban species; the narrative of urban return in which wild species reclaim the city; narratives about cities as sites of newly emergent species through evolution or technological modification; and narratives of urban bonds between humans and nonhumans. All of these narratives shift the emphasis from the city as an ecological wasteland to a new understanding of novel urban ecosystems and novel biological habitats that need to be understood in terms of multispecies justice.

Focusing on Cormac McCarthy’s The Road and Cherie Dimaline’s The Marrow Thieves, this chapter considers the Child as a conventional figure of futurity – as elucidated by Lee Edelman, Robin Bernstein, Natalia Cecire, Rebecca Evans, and Rebekah Sheldon. What happens to this figure when race becomes explicitly a part of narratives in which children, put into perilous motion by environmental collapse, struggle to find a safe place to grow up? One possible consequence, as Dimaline’s novel illustrates, is the granting to young characters an independent existence from the meanings encoded by the Child. Unlike The Road, which centers the father’s sense of guilt on the son having to find ways to survive in an environmentally destroyed world, The Marrow Thieves centers on young adult characters who struggle to hold together a non-familial community amid an environmental crisis. They think explicitly about how stories can bind them together in the pursuit of common survival even as they can tear individuals apart because of the horrors they recall, and in doing so imagines a future that comes into being in part as a result of the exercise of this agency.

This chapter argues for the rebirth of pastoral in the twenty-first century: as a genre responsive to climate change, mindful of the extinction of many species, and bearing the unique insights of indigenous peoples, with their memory of past catastrophes and their vision for a sustainable future. Woven into this argument are three classic American authors -- Washington Irving, Henry David Thoreau, and Herman Melville – each preoccupied with the subjection of Native peoples, but imagining very different fates for them. In Irving, the ruthless ascendency of colonial settlers makes Native demise a foregone conclusion. Moby-Dick, on the other hand, tells a more conflicting story. In spite of the casual reference to the “extinction” of the Pequots, the persistence of Native characters throughout the novel suggests that they might be here to stay. It is Tashtego’s “red arm and hammer” that we see at the book’s climactic end. Thoreau also equivocates, at one point showing the Abenaki as more firmly ensconced in their habitat than he himself can ever be. In this way, he looks forward to the pastoral affirmation of indigenous survival in the philosophy of Kyle Powys Whyte, and the climate activism of the Standing Rock Sioux tribe.

Chapter 20, “Encountering and Inventing Constantinople in Early Modern Europe,” discusses the idea of Constantinople in medieval and early modern Europe, and the lure it held for early modern antiquarians. It examines the nature of the city these scholars imagined against the reality of the city they found.

Chapter 5, “The Supply of Food to Constantinople,” discusses the supply, distribution, preparation, and consumption of food to the capital, noting the importance of the relationship between the urban center, its hinterland, and the empire’s distant provinces.

Chapter 17, “Entertainment,” considers Constantinople as a nexus of social space, civic ceremony, commercial entertainment, and endless diversion where streets and plazas were regularly taken over by processions, churches and monasteries were filled with clergy and worshipers, and competitive games and performances took place in the open-air hippodrome.

Chapter 18,” Medieval Travellers to Constantinople: Wonders and Wonder.” From its very beginnings, in the 330s, Constantinople attracted a steady flow of visitors from around the empire and the territories beyond its borders, travellers who arrived from the cardinal points to experience the city from various stations in life and in myriad ways. Their interactions with the city are the subject of this chapter, which offers an overview of the people who came to the city, their motives for travel, and their perceptions of the capital and the empire of which it was a hub.

Two years after Hurricane Hugo, which in 1989 devastated the unincorporated US territory St. Croix, and one year prior to her death from cancer, African Caribbean American poet Audre Lorde wrote a poem called “Restoration: A Memorial – 9/18/91.” The poem grew partly out of a series of journal entries that Lorde made in the wake of Hugo on St. Croix, her home at the time, and bears witness to the storm’s catastrophic aftermath, which, in Lorde’s view, was “man-made.” In her journal Lorde suggests that the Caribbean island had been made sick by the capitalist US government, which exploited it for its resources and then neglected it after the disaster – just as her own body had been made sick by pollution from US industry on the mainland and then sicker by the profit-driven “Cancer Establishment.” In this chapter, I will explore Lorde’s concept of restoration in both her poem and her journals. The concept empowered her to confront and resist the environmental injustice she saw affecting the environment around her along with her individual body.

This chapter addresses efforts to increase racial and ethnic diversity on US public lands and in US outdoor recreation through a case study of the organization Latino Outdoors. It argues that Latino Outdoors works to upend the exclusion of Latinx peoples from outdoor recreation and public lands through constructing and disseminating a Latinx Outdoor Recreation Identity. In doing so, Latino Outdoors disrupts a US cultural logic which incorporates the labor of Latinx peoples while denying their substantive citizenship as well as their political and ecological belonging. In contrast to legacies of Latinx outdoor labor, Latino Outdoors embraces Latinx leisure, and specifically Latinx outdoor leisure. Furthermore, the organization emphasizes historical forms of Latinx environmental knowledge, and thus environmental belonging. Latino Outdoors creates new forms of Latinx environmental belonging founded on leisure rather than labor. These forms of environmental belonging operate within Latino Outdoors as a proxy for political belonging and the grounds for political action.

From its foundation in the fourth century, to its fall to the Ottoman Turks in the fifteenth century, the name “Constantinople” not only identified a geographical location, but also summoned an idea. On the one hand, there was the fact of Constantinople, the city of brick, mortar, and marble that rose to preeminence as the capital of the Roman Empire on a hilly peninsula jutting into the waters at the confluence of the Sea of Marmora, the Golden Horn, and the Bosporos. On the other hand, there was the city of the imagination. To pronounce the name Constantinople conjured a vision of wealth and splendor unrivalled by any of the great medieval cities, east or west. The commanding geographical location together with the city’s status as an imperial capital, the correspondingly monumental scale of its built environment, the richness of its sacred spaces, and the power of the rituals that enlivened them drove this idea, as its urban fortunes waxed and waned in the course of its millennial history. The devastations of earthquakes, fire, plague, and pillage notwithstanding, the idea of Constantinopolitan greatness prevailed. If there was one thing about which the diverse and often quarrelsome populations of the Middle Ages could agree, it was on Constantinople’s status as the “Queen of Cities.”

Chapter 11, “Sacred Dimensions: Church Building and Ecclesiastical Practice,” examines the relationship between church building and ecclesiastical practice in Byzantine Constantinople. It outlines the ways in which architecture accommodates and responds to the exigencies of ritual both on a practical, and on a symbolic level to reveal how church buildings were understood symbolically as worship spaces, manifestations of piety, wealth, power, and prestige, and places of perpetual commemoration.