This exciting new collection of cutting-edge ecocritical essays is rich with diligent scholarship and passionate social commentary. These essays show the continuing vibrancy, good humor, analytical acuity, and activist commitment that have always characterized this field, while adding new theoretical subtlety.

—Scott Slovic, University of Nevada, Reno

Coming into Contact plays at the rich, diverse, productive edges of ecocritical theory and praxis as it effectively opens the field of literature-and-environment studies to dynamic new approaches and international literatures. Contributors to the volume map multicultural literatures from India to Japan to America and chart previously unexamined places including swamps, internment camps, and sites of cultural displacement. Readers, writers and scholars will find ground-shifting new discussions of the precautionary principle, ecological restoration, global biosurveillance, biological taxonomy, geology and evolutionary biology right alongside compelling explication of how we might use the concept of recycling in the composition classroom and why songs about lynching in the segregated South will forever alter our understanding of pastoral theory. These essays boldly and assuredly take their place among those included in The Ecocriticism Reader and Beyond Nature Writing as they afford readers, writers, and scholars a deeper understanding of the contributions ecocriticism has made and is making to disciplines both inside and outside the humanities.

—Joni Adamson, Arizona State University at the Polytechnic Campus

One of the delights of [Coming into Contact] introduces readers to a delicious smorgasbord of texts well beyond the canonical environmental writings.

—Ecology