Here's what the author, Debra Rosenthal of John Carroll University, has to say at the start:

"My title, with its irreverent rhyme linking the hip hop neighborhood to the green world of woods and forests, intends to suggest that juxtaposing rap lyrics to canonical environmental literature can extend our ecological literacy. Rap, with its bioregional emphasis on urban space and its attachment to locale, constitutes an urban environmental discourse hitherto overlooked by scholars of environmental literature. To read rap lyrics ecocritically is to position rap at the crossroads of African American literature and the predominantly white literary and critical field of environmental literature. Since the major studies of environmental literature pay little or no attention to African American writers, inserting rap as an African American literary production into an ecocritical conversation can open new directions for discussion of the interaction between humans and their nonhuman surroundings, particularly in the city."