The Anthropocene Reviewed

by John Green

The Anthropocene is a proposed term for the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. Nothing is more human than aggrandizing humans, but we are a hugely powerful force on Earth in the twenty-first century.

As a person, he told me, your biggest problem is other people. You are vulnerable to people, and reliant upon them. But imagine instead that you are a twenty-first-century river, or desert, or polar bear. Your biggest problem is still people. You are still vulnerable to them, and reliant upon them.

“For anyone trying to discern what to do w/ their life: PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT YOU PAY ATTENTION TO. That’s pretty much all the info u need.”

there are no observers; only participants.

We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here.

“Never predict the end of the world. You’re almost certain to be wrong, and if you’re right, no one will be around to congratulate you.”

maybe apocalyptic anxieties are a by-product of humanity’s astonishing capacity for narcissism.

The future, even in its inevitabilities, always feels vague and nebulous to me—until it doesn’t.

humanity is the apocalypse.

We’re the only part of the known universe that knows it’s in a universe. We know we are circling a star that will one day engulf us. We’re the only species that knows it has a temporal range.

One of my favorite words is dogged.

And so in hope, and in expectation, I give our temporal range four stars.

Marveling at the perfection of that leaf, I was reminded that aesthetic beauty is as much about how and whether you look as what you see. From the quark to the supernova, the wonders do not cease. It is our attentiveness that is in short supply, our ability and willingness to do the work that awe requires.

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity,

“nothing is as deceptive as a photograph”

And that seems to me one of the great oddities of the Anthropocene. For better or worse, land has become ours. It is ours to cultivate, to shape, even ours to protect. We are so much the dominant creature on this planet that we essentially decide which species live and which die, which grow in numbers like the Canada goose, and which decline like its cousin the spoon-billed sandpiper. But as an individual, I don’t feel that power. I can’t decide whether a species lives or dies. I can’t even get my kids to eat breakfast.

If I forget to turn off the lights when leaving a room, my daughter will often shout, “Dad, the polar bears!”

“It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”

It is easy for me to feel like climate is mostly an outside phenomenon, whereas I am mostly an inside phenomenon. But that’s all a misconception. I am utterly, wholly dependent on what I imagine as the outside world. I am contingent upon it. For humans, there is ultimately no way out of the obligations and limitations of nature. We are nature. And so, like history, the climate is both something that happens to us and something we make.

To me, one of the mysteries of life is why life wants to be. Life is so much more biochemical work than chemical equilibrium, but still, staph desperately seeks that work. As do I, come to think of it. Staphylococcus doesn’t want to harm people. It doesn’t know about people. It just wants to be, like I want to go on, like that ivy wants to spread across the wall, occupying more and more of it. How much? As much as it can.

My friend Stan Muller tells me that when you’re living in the middle of history, you never know what it means. I am living in the middle of the internet. I have no idea what it means. I give the internet three stars.

“We have really only that one light, one source for all power, and yet we must turn away from it by universal decree. Nobody here on the planet seems aware of this strange, powerful taboo, that we all walk around carefully averting our faces this way and that, lest our eyes be blasted forever.”

All I can say is that sometimes when the world is between day and night, I’m stopped cold by its splendor, and I feel my absurd smallness. You’d think that would be sad, but it isn’t. It only makes me grateful. Toni Morrison once wrote, “At some point in life, the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint, or even remember it. It is enough.” So what can we say of the clichéd beauty of sunsets? Perhaps only that they are enough.

The word news tells a secret on itself, though: What’s news isn’t primarily what is noteworthy or important, but what is new.

I find hopelessness to be a kind of pain. One of the worst kinds. For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.

We live in hope—that life will get better, and more importantly that it will go on, that love will survive even though we will not. And between now and then, we are here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here.

line from Robert Penn Warren’s All the King’s Men: “The end of man is knowledge, but there is one thing he can’t know. He can’t know whether knowledge will save him or kill him.”

Tradition is a way of being with people, not just the people you’re observing the traditions with now, but also all those who’ve ever observed them.

One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.

I believe that punctuality is a virtue, but there is nothing virtuous about my particular punctuality. It is driven by fear, and enforced by harried shouting.