The Anthropocene Reviewed

by John Green

Instead, let’s imagine Earth’s history as a calendar year, with the formation of Earth being January 1, and today being December 31 at 11:59 PM. The first life on Earth emerges around February 25. Photosynthetic organisms first appear in late March. Multicellular life doesn’t appear until August or September. The first dinosaurs like eoraptor show up about 230 million years ago, or December 13 in our calendar year. The meteor impact that heralds the end of the dinosaurs happens around December 26. Homo sapiens aren’t part of the story until December 31 at 11:48 PM.*

There is some comfort for me in knowing that life will go on even when we don’t. But I would argue that when our light goes out, it will be Earth’s greatest tragedy, because while I know humans are prone to grandiosity, I also think we are by far the most interesting thing that ever happened on Earth.

ONE OF THE ENDURING MYSTERIES of Halley’s comet is that nobody knows how to spell its name, as the comet is named for an astronomer who spelled his own surname variously as Hailey, Halley, and Hawley.

Shortly after the book came out, Fitzgerald wrote to a friend, “Of all the reviews, even the most enthusiastic, not one had the slightest idea what the book was about.”

For many species of large animals in the twenty-first century, the single most important determinant of survival is whether their existence is useful to humans.

Over the past twenty years, people living in usually cool central France, where home AC is uncommon, have been far more likely to die from heat waves than people living in usually sweltering Phoenix, where over 90 percent of households have at least some form of air-conditioning.

What’s absurd is reducing workplace productivity by using precious fossil fuels to excessively cool an office building so that men wearing ornamental jackets will feel more comfortable.

For people like myself, colonized by fascinatingly aggressive bacteria, there can be no hearkening back wistfully to past golden ages, because in all those pasts I would be thoroughly dead. In 1941, Boston City Hospital reported an 82 percent fatality rate for staph infections.

In Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, Annie Dillard writes, “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.”

It can sometimes feel like loving the beauty that surrounds us is somehow disrespectful to the many horrors that also surround us.

So much of what actually changes in human life isn’t driven by events, but instead by processes, which often aren’t considered news.

But more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined.

As Tina Rosenberg has written, “Probably the worst thing that ever happened to malaria in poor nations was its eradication in rich ones.”

We should get out of the habit of saying that anything is once-in-a-lifetime. We should stop pretending we have any idea how long a lifetime is, or what might happen in one.

I DON’T LABOR UNDER THE DELUSION that the United States is an exemplary or even particularly exceptional nation, but we do have a lot of the world’s largest balls.

It wasn’t the first time this had happened, but precedent is cold comfort

This is stunning

Almost everything turns out to be interesting if you pay the right kind of attention to it.

The ginkgo sticks out like a camera-toting tourist.

The veins in a ginkgo leaf do not branch and spider out like the leaves I’m accustomed to; instead, they are tiny, nearly parallel lines that converge at the base of the leaf like a calculus problem—the veins growing infinitely closer without ever quite touching.