Section one. On reading. The existential princess : a fairy tale. Beasts at bedtime : reading about nature with children ; Doctor Dolittle and the question of reading
Section two. Pastoral stories. Topophilia. The pastoral promise : and they all lived happily ever after ; The ecology of Pooh ; Peter Rabbit's brutal paradise ; In the garden of earthly delights ; Beyond the pool of darkness : the pastoral roots of Irish stories
Section three. Wilderness stories. Lost in the Popo Agie Wilderness. On the Mallard ; Where the wild things always were ; Wild and Grimm fairy tales : wilderness on the margins ; "Gollumgate" : Tolkien and Ireland ; "I am in fact a hobbit" : Tolkien as environmentalist ; The tin woodman's path of carnage through the Land of Oz ; Hunger and thirst in Suzanne Collins's Hunger games
Section four. Children on wild islands. Old Tom's island. The why and the what of islands ; Archmage Ged, Merlin, and Harry Potter and the training of wizards and witches ; Is L.T. Meade the real author of Enid Blyton's famous five? ; Robinson Crusoe : now here's a cannibalism tale for every child ; On isles benevolent; on isles malevolent
Section five. Urban stories. The urban wild. The urban to rural gradient of children's stories : The happy prince ; Antipathy to urban life in nursery rhymes ; Urban decay : R. Crumb in the nursery ; The escape artist : Calvin and Hobbes and the suburban idyll ; Babar : elephant and urban adapter
Section six. Learning to care. And the world hummed back. Caring for the rose : environmental literacy and Antoine de Saint-Exupéry's The little prince ; What then should we do? : the Lorax in the twenty-first century
Section seven. Good night, sleep tight. In the tot lot. Bookend conversations.