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With these words, inspired by the Epicurean tradition, the Latin poet Lucretius depicted a universe in which matter, eternal substance of interconnected forms, was to be considered as the core of every existing thing. 2 In a world inhabited by indifferent gods and melancholic humans such as the poet himself, a materialistic metaphysics was seen by Lucretius as a response to superstitions and a remedy to fear: fear about death, about the passions, about the weakness of humankind. Almost two millennia after the poem De rerum natura was composed, the material constitution of nature, and the nature of matter, are at the center of the so-called ‘material turn,’an interdisciplinary debate involving environmental philosophy, ecological humanities, and ecocriticism. Even though different from a metaphysical vision such as the one that enthused ancient philosophers and poets, a reflection on matter continues to be a reflection on the universe in which we live and on the ways we interact with its processes and forms.

In fact, matter is everything but a conceptual abstraction. From the standpoints of environmental thought,‘materiality’is the condition through which bodies act with and relate with each other, shaping other bodies; it is the condition whereby the health of living beings is mirrored and mutually determined by the ecological balances or imbalances of their environments or, in other words, the condition by which a toxic place determines toxic bodies and toxic life-styles determine toxic places. Reflecting on matter means reflecting on the modes of production and consumption of nature (s) as reservoirs of usable elements; it means reflecting on the way …