Places focus on the possibilities of being at home on the earth: finding place, reinhabitation, and becoming native. This collection begins with essays, which accentuate the links between culture and nature. Other essays speak to the loss of place and to being stewards of nature.

The contributors' views, writings, and contexts are variegated, but all share a sense that human identity is intimately tied to the land one lives on. And as in an ecosystem, the collection's great diversity yields abundant riches. At Home on the Earth represents the cutting edge of environmental thinking in the United States today. Throughout, the interactions between humans and nature convey a politics of hope, one sustained by faith in place itself. As Gary Snyder writes, "We are all indigenous to this planet, this mosaic of wild gardens we are being called by nature and history to reinhabit in good spirit."