This paper examines the relationship between environmental destruction and narrative form in Arabic literature through an analysis of Egyptian author Ahmed Naji’s 2014 novel Using Life (illustrated by Ayman al-Zorkany). The novel offers a speculative environmental history of Cairo through a catastrophic scenario of geoengineering that wreaks havoc on the city. It critiques environmentalist discourses and urban development projects that have radically transformed Egypt’s landscape since 1970s but failed to address environmental issues plaguing the citizens. Analyzing the causes of the Arab Spring, commentators often accentuate political and economic causes with little mention of environmental issues that factored into protestors’ demands for change. On the one hand, Using Life’s bleak depiction of urban Cairo as a decadent and stifling environment serves as an allegory for the decades-long political oppression that impelled Egyptians to take to the streets in 2011. On the other hand, Naji’s references to issues such as urban sprawl, pollution, climate change, desertification, and natural disasters point to actual environmental concerns that continue to affect Egyptians’ daily lives. Adopting a postcolonial ecocritical lens, this paper examines the novel’s critique of the co-optation of environmentalist discourse within global capitalism. Firstly, I demonstrate how the novel traces the continuity of environmental gentrification in Egypt from colonial Orientalist fantasies of settling the desert to green capitalism’s engineering of high-tech desert utopias. Secondly, I examine how the text’s concern with urban degradation affects narrative form. Using Life blends a wide variety of genres, ranging from memoir, epistle, philosophical treatise, literary criticism, news reportage, song, and comics to historiography. I demonstrate that this engagement with literary form and genre is foundational to the book’s discussion on environmental history. I argue that Using Life’s generic hybridity and allusions to classical forms of Arabic literature link this contemporary text to medieval definitions of “adab” (literature; urbanity; civility) that complicate modern disciplinary and formal boundaries. Using Life’s attention to form does not so much reflect the transformation of a particular literary genre but of literature itself—that is, literature in the face of global ecological crises. This research contributes to contemporary discussions in environmental humanities on the role of literature in exposing the intertwined histories of environmental violence, colonialism, and global capitalism. Returning to this organic connection between “adab” and urbanity opens up new venues of ecocritical inquiry in the field of Middle East Studies for investigating the relationship between literary aesthetics, humanism, and urban ecology.