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Fallen Forests makes legible the holistic vision and hybrid genres of earlier American women writers, who understood "nature" and "the environment" within a complex matrix of embodied and social experiences rather than as distinct intellectual or political concerns in the Thoreauvian or Jeffersonian modes. Fallen Forests demonstrates how gendered rhetoric impacts possibilities for social amelioration, and it historicizes discussions of "nature writing" and environmental activism. Contemporary debates regularly revisit such concepts as sustainability, green Christianity, resource depletion and resource wars, globalization and relocalization, "simple living," and environmental justice. Using a lens of chronological reciprocity and focusing on several key issues over five chapters, Fallen Forests engages these debates by examining how nineteenth-century women writers' failures and successes--in particular, their rhetoric, ethos, and forms--offer cautions and strategies for change today.