An Earth Brimming with Interest: Everyday Landscapes and Multispecies Relevance in The Nature Book
Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: In the early twenty-first century, wildlife habitats are rapidly shrinking and the number of animal and plant species is declining—troubling trends that scholars have variously dubbed the “sixth extinction” (Kolbert 2014), the “Homogenocene” (Mann 2011), and even the “war against animals” (Wadiwel 2015). Against this background of structural endangerment, the present article details how Tom Comitta’s The Nature Book (2023), akin to acclaimed texts like Yedda Morrison’s Darkness (2012) and Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13 (2017), enriches ongoing debates on environmental storytelling, attention, and the senses by exploring mundane landscapes and multispecies noticing. As the title suggests, The Nature Book does not recount the story of human characters but strings together mini-narratives about other creatures, as in the following scene: Papier-mâché mountains grew red [as the sun rose on] the very picturesque valley … [F]lies buzzed in a great peace. … [On a rocky shelf, a] goat sensed danger [and saw how] dizzyingly far down below … there was … a mountain lion. … And the sun illuminated her so clearly that it was as if the goat saw her close up … feeding on a jackrabbit. … The silence was horrible. [N]o bird’s note in the wood … [T]his emphasized silence was gradually disturbed by a sound not easily to be verbally rendered … in the chokecherry bushes beyond. The mountain lion lifted her heavy head [and] then [abruptly] disappeared among the trees. … A half-eaten jackrabbit lay beside a tree stump … (Comitta 2023a, 227-9)
DOI: 10.1093/isle/isaf027
Author: Ben De Bruyn
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
SDG: Life on land
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W6940638164