Despite the preponderance of oil in the Middle East, there are only a handful of critical studies on the intersection of Arabic literature and oil. This paper seeks to redress this gap by plumbing environmental insights from the nomadic protagonists of characters in novels by Saudi Arabian writer Abdal-Rahman Munif by examining the understudied figure of the ‘Ecological Nomad’ in unison with nature and at war with the violent aspects of petro-modernity. Abd al-Rahman Munif evaluates the environmental politics of the region in relation to this figure. Oil is indeed a sticky subject of narration for Munif who worked in the oil industry for nearly two decades only to revile the politics of petroleum production in his fiction. I show how Munif ties together political critique and ecological mourning through the figure of the ecological nomad in his quintet Mudun al- Milh (Cities of Salt 1984- 1989). The ecological nomad reveres the lives of non-humans on their own terms, cares deeply for the embattled dessert, communes with its non-human inhabitants, and attempts yet fails to ward off the extractive exploits such as drilling for oil, overuse of dwindling resources and disrespect for nonhuman existence. I place the quintet in conversation with al-Nihāyāt (1978, English trans. Endings, 2007), which takes place at a time of prolonged drought in the desert Its ecological nomad ʿAssaf tries to persuade the community to not overhunt and not to uphold the privileges of a few at the expense of nature. There is much to be learned from the novels under study in this book; for sustaining the natural environment in the face of climate change, countering disregard for the non-human world, and urging us to tread gently into the future. I aim to make this paper a contribution to our understanding of the broader politics of our current moment of climate crisis through the less recognized but powerful potentialities of ecocritical Arabic fiction and by sounding the alarm about things that may not yet be visible but are already coming to pass.