Examines the ecological impulse as a "desire for nature", a desire that emerges as people within industrial capitalist contexts respond to the personal and aesthetic, rather than the physical and political implications of ecological breakdown.

While exploring the historical causes of this romantic "desire for nature", Heller also offers a way to reconstruct ideas of both "nature" and "desire", drawing from feminist, anarchist and social ecological theory. She provides an activist response to ecological questions, linking the desire for a more meaningful and integral quality of life to the activist impulse itself.