The Introduction situates the reader in our present social and environmental era, specifically in a globally enmeshed United States. It explains our conception of the book’s three central terms: America, Environment, and Literature. It gives an overview of the history of ecocriticism, especially pertaining to North America, and how our authors contribute to, and innovate, that tradition. It ends with a summary of each chapter.

For decades, the Environmental Justice movement in the US has been assessing and opposing the ongoing, harmful material legacies of the plantation for people of African descent. Recently, a few scholars have been trying to think with but also beyond the harm paradigm in order to represent the complexity of the past and possibilities for the future. Paramount to this effort is a prying apart of the malevolent human actions which brought and bring about environmental injustices from a nonhuman world which did not, and does not, innately operate on any race-based ideology. A number of visual artists, in particular, are investigating, and using new media to represent, ancestral Black environmental imaginaries. This chapter focuses on one contemporary photographer, Dawoud Bey, who produced a photographic series in 2017, Night Coming Tenderly, Black, in which he visualizes how a fugitive slave might have moved through, and looked at, northern US woods. Bey seems to recognize that to dismantle the naturalized racism that undergirds the US, he must disencumber nature of its white properties and Black bodies of their disastrous associations, as he investigates what it could mean for Black people to watch nature carefully, all the while feeling for its tenderness.

“Climate and Race” begins with a scene from Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing (1989), considered in the context of scholarship on urban heat islands, to make evident one crucial mode in which anthropogenic climate and racial grouping intersect now and will do so going forward. That established, the chapter then jumps backward in time, to the early modern period, and works gradually forward, to witness the long history of how people in Europe and America theorized the intersection of climatic and human variety. In distinction from what geneticists now contend about the ways that racial categories fail to correlate with miniscule genetic variations between human groups, and in distinction from ancient and early modern theorists who believed that bodies were so porous as to be composed differently by different environments and changed as they relocated, the most consequential modern race theorists gained traction by attending to bodily surfaces, and defining them as indexes of invisible and immutable features underneath. The chapter traces the ways in which this modern concept developed and how climate featured as an aspect of, and at times as a counterpoint to, this history of thinking.