Accidental Gravity moves from upstate New York to the contemporary western U.S., from urban and suburban places to wild lands. The essays are informative, but the focus is personal. Quetchenbach writes about urban and suburban places as well as wild lands. In the first section of the book, he focuses on suburban neighborhoods, "the places where tensions between human and animal nature, and between differing concepts of the natural world, come to the fore."  In the second section, he juxtaposes these humanized places with Yellowstone National Park, in the context of climate change and other contemporary pressures.