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.

“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.”

We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet’s atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.

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.

I know it will never fully end—the next normal will be different from the last one. But there will be a next normal, and I hope you are living in it, and I hope I am living in it with you.

We may feel alone (in fact, we will feel alone), but even in the crushing grind of isolation, we aren’t alone. Like Louise at her graduation, those who are distant or even gone are still with us, still encouraging us to walk on.

That’s how for tens of thousands of years we’ve been eating creatures faster and stronger than us. We. Just. Keep. Going.

But lately, I’ve come to believe that such despair only worsens our already slim chance at long-term survival. We must fight like there is something to fight for, like we are something worth fighting for, because we are.

“The Destiny of Earthseed is to take root among the stars”?

Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream.

And it’s a critique of the kind of vapid capitalism that can’t find anything more interesting to do with money than try to make more of it.

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.

Sarah Dessen once wrote that home is “not a place, but a moment.” Home is a teddy bear, but only a certain teddy bear at a certain time.

I was repulsed by the idea that they were giving money to a corporation in order to escape their horrible, miserable lives that were horrible and miserable in part because our corporate overlords controlled all the means of production.

Two of the Anthropocene’s major institutions are the nation-state and the limited liability corporation, both of which are real and powerful—and on some level made-up. The United States isn’t real the way a river is real, nor is the Walt Disney Company.

“The world is too much with us; late and soon.”

I cannot tell if the day is ending, or the world, or if the secret of secrets is inside me again.

As the artist Tacita Dean put it, “Color is a fiction of light.”

But to grieve in a pandemic is to both grieve and fear.

But infectious disease continues to separate us in our most vulnerable moments.

the extensively precedented tragedy of not being able to hold the hand of your beloved and say goodbye.

“The only way out is through.”

And the only good way through is together.

I’m not here to criticize other people’s hope, but personally, whenever I hear someone waxing poetic about the silver linings to all these clouds, I think about a wonderful poem by Clint Smith called “When people say, ‘we have made it through worse before.’” The poem begins, “all I hear is the wind slapping against the gravestones / of those who did not make it.”

nothing that we know of is forever—not even this.

It was one of those days where you realize that “sky” is just another human construct, that the sky starts wherever the ground ends.

Certain that meaning is just a lie we tell ourselves to survive the pain of meaninglessness.

The picture is a reminder that you never know what will happen to you, to your friends, to your nation. Philip Roth called history “the relentless unforeseen.”

“History is merely a list of surprises,” Kurt Vonnegut wrote. “It can only prepare us to be surprised yet again.”

They are reminders that I, too, would in time be surprised by history, and that a picture, though static, keeps changing as its viewers change. As Anaïs Nin put it, “We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”