Ultimately, Shelter evokes a wider conception of "home." It comes full circle as it calls on those people mentioned early in the piece--those who looked upon the homeless woman with fear and disgust, regarding her as dangerous and crazy. Shelter explores homelessness and the many emotions that rage through the woman who has lost her home--all of which belie the reductive unidimensionality of outsiders' reactions. It also warns those who would distance themselves from that homeless woman and conceive of themselves as lodged safely on the opposite end of the spectrum from her that living on the streets can come about through a single mistake, one wrong turn: it can happen to you.

The narrator returns to tell you and you and you, all of us, that our homes, our shelters, are in fact being jeopardized, every minute, through phenomena like "population growth, poverty, ill-advised policies, and simple greed." We realize the macrocosmic similarity of our situation and that of the homeless woman, with her resources gradually petering out, as we hear the ominous words: "The Earth is suffering the decline of entire ecosystems. The nursery for new life forms is dying. We are now experiencing the death of Earth." In this world of potentially destructive military and nuclear power, we are all ultimately, like the snow leopard and the bald eagle--like "black children living in America"--endangered species.