Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene (14)

by Alessandra Naccarato

Imminent Reckoning with the Anthropocene invites readers to join a contemplation of survival―our own, and that of the elements that surround us. Using research, lyric prose, and first-hand experiences, Alessandra Naccarato addresses fundamental questions about our modern relationship to nature amidst depictions of landscapes undergoing dramatic transformation. We trace the veins of harm, memory and meaning amongst ecosystems and bioregions; through history and across continents, from the mines of Cerro Rico to the ruins of Pompeii. Arranged by five central elements of survival―earth, fire, water, air and spirit―these essays refute linearity, just as nature does. Naccarato offers not blanket answers about our future, but rather myriad ways to find our own, individual response to an imminent question. We are being called to work together; to dig a trench deep and wide enough that the fires around us might stay at bay. How do we turn towards the fire?

Genres: Nonfiction, Nature

240 pages, Paperback

First published October 25, 2022

Reviews

[Ashley · Rating 3 out of 5]

Firstly- Read by physical or ebook, I really don't recommend this book via audio. Every audiobook will have the occasional re-recorded section but this one had more then I've ever encountered before and the voice difference was jarring. Also, occasionally you hear numbers being said and I assumed it was possibly a formatting technique- so I just checked the ebook copy to see what structuring I may have missed. In some essays it was a titling method as I originally expected but others ...were the endnote superscripts. While I've listened to books where the footnotes are read I've never had the superscripts just said aloud with no actual foot/endnote. The production and editing of the audio was lacking.

There were several essays I really enjoyed. I really valued the author's interplay between chronic illness, zoonotic disease, and extractive economy, the exploration of the conflicting connections many people have with crystals, the prevalence of American influence in the geo-politics of mineral rich nations, the bio-ethics of cloning endangered species and the involvement of commercial interests, the work of Indigenous water and land defenders and the police brutality they face, there's a lot of value in many of the essays. The heart of this work is in the right place, if you have more patience for the poetic then this may be the perfect collection for you.

I should have loved this and at times I did. The author and I have overlap, both from the Toronto area, around the same age, Irish heritage, bisexual, flirtations with witchcraft, and love nature and writing. But I should know myself by now that inevitably, works by poets and/or MFA students almost never works for me. There a certain ego and pomposity that is imbued in their works that drives me crazy. I do often love the inter-blending of personal narratives and nature writing (Why Fish don't Exist, Braiding Sweetgrass, Rooted, etc) but the personal should serve a purpose. Writing about a guy going down on you in a hot tub, and partying while a tropical storm is imminent, no thanks. Hurricane's Eye turned the reading experience from one I was quite enjoying to one I was side-eying. The essays about bees recovered it somewhat. The essay about her grandmother's home garden and rabbit hutches had excellent bones of what makes a great personal/natural essay but I think overall fell flat, I think there could have been more power added about urban gardens and self-sustaining practices but instead twee lines about feeling her grandmother's death. And then there's reference to homeopathy (aka nonsense). In an interview the author states that "In the midst of ecological grief, it reminds me I am not a protagonist in the story of this world...", yet in almost every essay the balance between the personal and the ecological is always weighed towards herself. Then I find a lot of the less poetical and factual information is relegated to deemed optional "Understory" section. It's disappointing.

I overall agree with the author's stance on colonialism being a major driving force behind climate change and industrial production though I don't believe it should be considered the only one. The author seems to be one of those who only counts white/European colonialism and ignores the other forms colonialism has been enacted in other places in the world. I think looking at these issues as only through the colonizer/ settler viewpoint narrows the focus and gives a pass to other forms of extractive control and dominance of nature. While human greed is required for the colonial drive it does not exist solely within it. There are mentalities the precede and enable the colonial drive that shouldn't be ignored, when it's those that need to be changed to actually combat extractive economics.

Because the author references her Irish heritage, I found particularly off-putting the reference to the Irish famine as a failure of monoculture crops when in fact there were significant other crops grown in Ireland at the time but they were for the purpose of export to England, tons of fresh food rotted in ports while the Irish died of starvation because the English believed allowing them to eat the food grown on their own land was charity and therefore to be discouraged. That an Irish descendant writing within an anti-colonialist framework would parrot the monoculture failure line is aggravating.

I also find it interesting that there are no rating of this book below 3 stars. I would have sworn there was one a couple days ago but it's now no longer here.

[Kate · Rating 5 out of 5]

|| IMMINENT DOMAINS ||
#gifted/@bookhugpress
•
An impressive and vulnerable essay collection on climate change.

This book is tough to summarize. It's about climate change but it's from a personal perspective more than a scientific. I don't read a lot of books on climate change probably because I worry they will cause me to feel hopeless but this one left me feeling oddly comforted. It leaves you to wonder more than giving a definitive conclusion.

Naccarato writes of the chaotic ways colonialism and capitalism have damaged and changed our landscape. Even though this is more of a personal take on the subject, the scientific parts felt really well researched. I loved the layout as well, it flowed really nicely. An accessible read. Naccarato has a poetic background so her prose spoke to me right away.

There is so much to say about this collection but I reccomend you check it out yourself. If you already enjoy climate related books, personal essay collections or it just generally sounds interesting to you. And I hope you love it as much as I did!

For more of my book content check out instagram.com/bookalong

[Carla Harris · Rating 5 out of 5]

Powerful essays on the ecocide that we are trapped in, highlighting the dangerously impact of colonization on non dominant cultures & low socioeconomic groups. Some research essays, some cnf essays, poems and poetic prose. It really hit home a few times to verbalize pain and grief for the losses we are continuing to cause.

[Mark MacKenzie · Rating 5 out of 5]

“We are not alone. We reach out and something reaches back.” If you want a simple distillation of Alessandra Naccarato’s Imminent Domains, Reckoning with the Anthropocene (Book*hug Press, Toronto, 2022) maybe this will do. There are hints she gives us that if no other message sticks to you after reading this remarkable work, you could bring that one home with you and dwell with it.

The Anthropocene: if that is a part of a book’s title, you know there is going to be a certain amount of “everything’s fucked” here. The Anthropocene may not yet be the official international scientific consensus for a name for our age, but there are enough compelling reasons to accept it- the fundamental qualitative change in the strata of rock being laid down in the crust of the earth over the last century or so will be observable to any intelligent being using empirical methods to examine our planet for billions of years in the future. The sudden appearance of radionuclides. Of plastics and other novel chemical compositions never previously present in nature. The simultaneous and almost-instantaneous disappearance from the fossil record of countless types of animals. We know what is being described when we see that word.

This is the mess we’ve made, after all; the result of humanity's extractive hunger for the things that may be wrung from the planet which gives us life. Worldwide ecological collapse is happening, and the problems of dealing with it, of making a substantive enough effort to correct it, are as intractable as the basic structures of acquisitive violence which dominate human society. Nacarrato examines this from places as divergent as an old orchard on Saltspring Island, Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, increasingly providing fodder for right-wing pundits as “a living hell”, and Cerro Rico, Potosi, Bolivia, a mountain riddled with veins of silver which has been voraciously exploited by the colonial/capitalist system since the 1500s at the cost of the lives of millions of slaves and almost-slaves right down to this moment.

Sorrow, mourning, anguish, anger, wrath, all these are appropriate emotional responses to the violence of the ecological collapse we are witnessing. Naccarato experiences and shares with us all of these in her own encounter with the Anthropocene in this exceptionally personal book. Her engagement with it brings the reader with her as she focuses on a small sample of the effects of human behaviour on the world through the lens of her own experience.

That said, Imminent Domains is not “merely” subjective in its approach. This collection of essays, or perhaps more accurately, this book-length essay, investigates its subjects with a fierce, concentrated gaze. Some of these are: the mass industrialization of honeybees, the ever-increasing emergence and spread of zoonotic, that is- animal-vectored diseases in humans, as we invade and destabilize the ecosystems they inhabit, the dark underside of the healing crystal industry, and the meaning for us of extinction and the very occasional re-emergence of animal species. There is much more. Naccarato has obviously done extensive research. I am not an ecologist, but I have an interest in and attachment to the natural world and thought I knew a fair bit about what was going on. I was continually surprised, shocked, dismayed and, occasionally, rendered hopeful by the things she revealed.

Naccarato as a writer remains firstly a poet. Imminent Domains, for all the statistical knowledge and scientific acumen it displays, is a poet’s inquiry. Naccarato seeks underlying connections between the superficially disparate. She melds a small child’s view of the world with that of a scientist. She takes us with her through her own life as her understanding of the world evolved and changed. And at times, for me, this journey became a weakness. Early on in my reading I was utterly captivated by Imminent Domains, but as I was more and more immersed in Naccarato’s life journey, I began to feel led astray on occasion, unsure what was happening to the book’s focus.

I didn't want to be taken into the peregrinations and love affairs of a young woman, a counterculturalist vagabond. Perhaps it is because it hit too close to home. I am almost 20 years older than Naccarato, but I was uncomfortable being reminded of the naivety and hypocrisy of my own youth. In her stories of her extensive travels, I saw too clearly the person I would have been, had I been a less dedicated drinker and pure hedonist. I, who once favoured tie-dyed t-shirts almost certainly made in Bangladesh sweatshops, who believed smoking tons of weed, in those days predominantly distributed by organized crime syndicates, was an appropriate protest against paternalistic capitalism, squirmed a bit to read of her younger self roaming the world unknowingly cushioned by the privilege of light skin and a powerful passport. I would have sought out precisely the same kinds of experiences if I had had the imagination to spend a few hundred bucks of my tree planting wages on airfare rather than in bars getting wasted at funky reggae and punk rock shows. Naccarato’s shame put me uncomfortably into a confrontation with my own.

But it's not that this confessionality at the core of Imminent Domains fails to deliver. As an example, countless thousands of kind, well-meaning people seek healing in an emotional unity with the earth through the magical agency of crystals. The empathy and sensitivity which gives them their moral earnestness often makes them particularly vulnerable to emotional wounds of the sort that a ritual like praying to a healing crystal can apparently alleviate. It makes sense that injuries of sensitivity and belief would be amenable to faith and the courageous openness required of this sort of act. Naccarato describes her own early faith in crystals, what they did and didn’t do for her, and takes us through her gradual awakening to the unpleasant reality that whether or not a crystal of one sort or another can focus psychic energy in some beneficial way, they are almost always a byproduct of environmentally catastrophic mining operations carried out through heedlessly brutal, exploitative labour conditions. The person who sells them to you may honestly believe they are “ethically sourced”, but the anonymous portability of the item and the obscure supply chain that transports it generally means that assertion is worth no more than the sticker it is printed on.

So it might be that my reservations about Imminent Domains lie simply in the divergence between the book I began to want Naccarato to write and the book she wanted to write. Even when I had my doubts, Imminent Domains forced me to clarify what, then, did I believe?

Nacarrato locates the source of much of the destruction humanity is wreaking on the natural world in the patriarchal structures of European settler colonialism. It could be that my modest objections here are rooted in the fact that as a hard-working, reasonably sober, late-middle-aged male of Protestant Scottish and other north-European descent, I am precisely the person the English colonial project in North America was intended to benefit. But I am inclined to argue that settler colonialism, pervasive, genocidal and all-plundering, is a manifestation of an earlier human impulse to violently-ordered hierarchy that has emerged repeatedly and independently throughout the world. But I think here Naccarato would point out that there is a particular novelty in the European varietal of settler colonialism; that it rides on an illusion, spread now throughout the world, that although we, its multitude of beneficiaries, are all part of a single imperial core, we can lull ourselves with the belief that the blood that sustains it is on someone else’s hands.

I would recommend anyone with a scrap of concern for what is going on in our world read this work. The catastrophe we are facing is every bit as bad and most likely worse than we think it is, and Alessandra Naccarato doesn’t flinch from addressing this, but she doesn't collapse in helplessness either. She gives the reader no simple prescription for fixing it, but in her journey we see the way she has found to keep moving, to keep hopeful, to act and be in some manner that counters the grinding, acquisitive monster that is our civilization.

Perhaps at the core of this book is a call to become comfortable with contradiction and complexity. The inexorability of linear logic that got us into this mess can't get us out, yet we can't utterly abandon rationality either. Individuals in this world are relatively powerless against the corporate colossi that dominate it, and yet we are called upon to solve the problems caused by those corporations, which in turn owe their power to the patterns of our own behaviour. We diligently put plastics that don't get recycled into recycle bins, while we are almost inevitably required to purchase plastic garbage along with everything we buy. No amount of personal agency seems enough, and yet it seems it is all we have to work with.

As I write, there is a protest in downtown Vancouver against the activities of The Metals Company (TMC), a locally-based giant which is pioneering the mining of the ocean floors, an activity which is virtually unregulated and will cause some form of damage, although we know not precisely what, to the very base of the oceanic food chain. Yet we are told this nascent free-for-all bonanza being unleashed on the ocean floors is necessary if we are to provide ourselves with personal electric cars. This is occurring a year after her book was written, but the ambitions of a company like TMC are exactly the type of thing that Naccarato is able to address using the subjects she examines as a proxy.

Seabed mining obviously differs from the use of inconceivably vast numbers of European honey bees, half of which die in the process, to pollinate genetically-modified monoculture crops. But the same deranged kind of logic drives both activities. We pull what we want from the world to satisfy a logically-ordered set of requirements, while in that precise action we increase the precarity of our own existence, something which can be predicted with equal logic and empirical certainty.

Alessandra Naccarato doesn't give us a dreary list of ideas to fix this world. Well, she does have one- you won’t ever buy almond milk again. But if one were to make a list, some might include the notion that maybe we can have society that radically limits the production and use of plastics, of pesticides, the notion of a society which looks back, maybe fondly, but with a conscious understanding that it was unsustainable, on a century where ideas of freedom equated to individual car ownership. Most importantly, we might include the notion of the landscape that surrounds us as something alive, with rights and needs and deserving of a relationship, rather than simply an inert, passive thing from which to wring what we desire.

None of these ideas can at present gain any traction in the political and economic arena in which we exist. And yet these ideas persist, impossible, impractical, and in some deep part of us, if we are honest with ourselves, we know they make up some of the necessary components of a human society that can perhaps begin to undo some of the damage it has done to the ecosystem that supports it. It has to be imagined if it is to be brought into reality.

Imminent Domains reminded me that despite the horror and sadness, the world is full of little miracles. If we are attentive, it will provide us with new ones every single day. My younger son just entered the room to show me a video of a guy who uses the micro-electric charges generated by mycelium to trigger synthesizer modules. Music created by fungi. My son uses it as his wake-up alarm. It's a crap alarm- he sleeps through it- but it's an utterly marvelous thing.

Magical thinking can’t change the world, yet the world won't change without a certain amount of magical thinking. As I came to the end of Alessandra Naccarato’s Imminent Domains, a line from an early 19th century German poet named Friedrich Holderlin came to mind. I seem to remember it translated something like “Where there is danger growing, there, also, is the saving power”.

[Enid Wray · Rating 5 out of 5]

How fitting that this opens with memories of a wildfire!

And, a little later, she explores both fire and fungal networks as both metaphor and fact… and in so doing she bring so mind so many other - seemingly disparate - works.

This is a gorgeous little book of essays - you can tell that she’s a poet at heart by her wordplay and the way she uses language to firmly centre we - the humans - at the core of things. There is no looking away from what is taking place around us.

Even her afterword is something else… more like a meditation on gratitude.

One line nicely summarises this book: “Interconnection is the heartwood of this book.” (p209)... indeed it is all that matters ultimately… that we are all connected.

She weaves so many seemingly disparate threads together… so many things that were the core of my World Issues classes when I was in the classroom - things like water wars (Bechtel, Cochabamba), international mining (check out Choropampa: The Price of Gold, by two (then) young Canadian filmmakers), blood diamonds and more. I quite likely would have made this - or at least parts of it - required reading in that class had it been available then.

And let’s face it, anyone whose book ends with a quote from Vandana Shiva has got me wrapped around its proverbial baby finger.

Then there are her Endnotes and (Selected Bibliography)... additional treasure troves, bonus items at the end…

Highly recommended.

[Laura Jones · Rating 4 out of 5]

When I first started reading this book I didn’t know what to expect and I was initially disappointed. The first essay takes a very depressing view of life and appears to view everything through a fatalistic lens, with virtually no optimism. I wondered how on Earth I was going to finish the rest of the book.

However, subsequent essays were a much more pleasant read and the tone and mood picked up, although there is a somewhat downbeat undertone overall. The book is very beautifully written yet easy to read and understand. If you enjoy books of essays that make you think and enable you to see the world from a different perspective to your own, I would recommend this book.

With thanks to Netgalley and Book*hug press for providing an advance review copy. All opinions are my own.

[toria (vikz writes) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Thank you to Netgalley and Book hug press for letting me see this book and provide you with an honest review. This book is a series of essays. It explores modern-day life, living in the Anthropocene. It is part natural history and part memoir. It lyrically explores the author's life and their relationship with nature. If you like Helen Macdonald and Olivia Laing, then you will like this. I highly recommend this book.

[Farida Ali · Rating 4 out of 5]

Imminent Domains: Reckoning with the Anthropocene is a series of essays that invite the reader to contemplate living in the Anthropocene. Cleverly written and drawn from life experiences and research, the essays can be read again and again.
I have not read many books in this genre, this one was definitely an excellent introduction.

[Leah Horton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read Braiding Sweetgrass in 2020 and it became my favourite comfort book. I think about it and my heart is happy. This is now its companion. I appreciated this book so much. It felt like i was seen. No longer that weird socially and Environmentally aware child that was anxious and nervous about everything and not understanding why I am now an adult who is trying to figure it all out. This book felt like a “here you are… you aren’t alone”. Everyone. Read. This. Book.

[Janet Trull · Rating 4 out of 5]

Anguish, mental and physical, dealt with honestly and with a keen desire to move forward from difficult experiences. Makes me think of something I read...

Life is not a continuum of progress.
More like an ebb and flow of success and failure, glory and defeat, love and loss, broken hearts, grief, anger, tragedy.

by Pema Chödrön

[Beth Wallace · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed the authors writing style in this book. I enjoyed the multiple essay perspectives on the Anthropocene and questions we are facing about it. Overall it was an informative and I look forward to reading more of her work.

[Kelsey Weekman]

Fascinating and lyrical essays that explore the author's relationship with nature. Really pretty. I would love to dive more into their work. Not something I would recommend to everyone, but I'm glad I found this gem. For fans of Olivia Laing.

[Madds · Rating 3 out of 5]

I would recommend reading this and not using the audio book. There are issues with the sound balancing and you can very obviously tell what sections were rerecord.

[Audrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

A wide-ranging, poetic look at the state of the world and the state of humanity's mental and physical health. Lots to ponder.

[Tanya Neumeyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book was well-woven. I was captivated by the storytelling while I learned more about the complex problems in this world. This book is a gift. Thank you Alessandra.