My summer job during college was working as hut “croo” in New Hampshire’s White Mountain backcountry huts. Alongside my peers, I cooked, cleaned, maintained the hut’s energy systems, schlepped food into the mountains and trash down from them, responded to hikers in distress, did mountains of dishes, and provided “high mountain hospitality” to the day hikers who passed through and the guests who stayed nightly. Very quickly these huts and the trails around them came to feel like home. And they were also my first visceral introduction to ecological footprint of outdoor recreation, whether I was changing a propane tank for the stove, maintaining the composting toilets, or feeling tomato juice drip down my back as I packed out the trash from cooking for 60 nightly. Those summers shaped my career. Today I’m a professor of English who teaches courses in the environmental humanities, which means my courses cover things from how plants were important to European colonialism to 21st-century fiction about climate change.