The Anthropocene Reviewed

by John Green

The writer Allegra Goodman was once asked, “Whom would you like to write your life story?” She answered, “I seem to be writing it myself, but since I’m a novelist, it’s all in code.”

The Anthropocene is a proposed term for the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity.

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.

she pointed out that in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants.

“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.”

1. We must go on, and 2. None of us ever walks alone. 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.

in about a billion years, the sun will be 10 percent more luminescent than it is now, likely resulting in the runaway evaporation of Earth’s oceans.

In about four billion years, Earth’s surface will become so hot that it will melt.

“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. How could the world possibly survive the death of its single most important inhabitant—me?

“Modern humans,” as we are called by paleontologists, have been around for about 250,000 years. This is our so-called “temporal range,” the length of time we’ve been a species. Contemporary elephants are at least ten times older than us—their temporal range extends back to the Pliocene Epoch, which ended more than 2.5 million years ago. Alpacas have been around for something like

Humans are already an ecological catastrophe. In

for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, during the Permian extinction, ocean surface waters likely reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius. Ninety-five percent of Earth’s species went extinct, and for five million years afterward, Earth was a “dead zone” with little expansion of life.

Sixty-six million years ago, an asteroid impact caused a dust cloud so huge that darkness may have pervaded Earth for two years, virtually stopping photosynthesis and leading to the extinction of 75 percent of land animals.

think part of what scares me about the end of humanity is the end of those memories. I believe that if a tree falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it, it does make a sound. But if no one is around to play Billie Holiday records, those songs really won’t make a sound anymore.

We’re the only part of the known universe that knows it’s in a universe.

It’s no coincidence that the scientific revolution in Britain coincided with the rise of British participation in the Atlantic slave trade and the growing wealth being extracted from colonies and enslaved labor.

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,

To me, though, the hand stencils say, “I was here.” They say, “You are not new.”

dinosaurs in the park did not live in the Jurassic age, which ended one hundred and forty-five million years ago, but instead in the Cretaceous age, which ended sixty-six million years ago with the extinction event that resulted in the disappearance of around three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, including all large species of what we now consider dinosaurs.

We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph”—and yet I still can’t help but believe them.

At any given time, about 80 percent of American humans are in or near urban areas. For Canada geese, it’s about 75 percent.

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.

So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose.

THE ENGLISH WORD BEAR comes to us from a Germanic root, bero, meaning “the brown one” or “the brown thing.”

it was believed saying the bear’s true name could summon one. In any case, this taboo was so effective that today we are left with only the replacement word for bear—essentially, we call them “You Know Who.”

total combined weight of all living humans currently on Earth is around three hundred and eighty-five million tons. That is the so-called biomass of our species. The biomass of our livestock—sheep, chickens, cows, and so on—is around eight hundred million tons. And the combined biomass of every other mammal and bird on Earth is less than one hundred million tons. All the whales and tigers and monkeys and deer and bears and, yes, even Canada geese—together, they weigh less than a third of what we weigh.

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.

Both the nation and the corporation can only exist if at least some people believe in them. And in that sense, they really are kinds of magic kingdoms.

Mary Hunt found one on a cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois, grocery store. That strain became even more productive after being exposed to X-rays and ultraviolet radiation. Essentially all penicillin in the world descends from the mold on that one cantaloupe in Peoria.*

Wordsworth poem that begins, “The world is too much with us; late and soon.”

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.

“The sky at sunset looked like a carnivorous flower”?

“Soon it got dusk, a grapy dusk, a purple dusk over tangerine groves and long melon fields . . . the fields the color of love and Spanish mysteries”?

when I see the sun sink below a distant horizon as the yellows and oranges and pinks flood the sky, I usually think, “This looks photoshopped.” When I see the natural world at its most spectacular, my general impression is that more than anything, it looks fake.

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.

don’t know how to deal with the question’s in. Do I believe in God? I believe around God. But I can only believe in what I am in—sunlight and shadow, oxygen and carbon dioxide, solar systems and galaxies.

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

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.

Pope John Paul II is reported (probably falsely) to have said, “Of all the unimportant things, football is the most important.”

The opening sequence of the 2014 film Penguins of Madagascar is one of the greatest scenes in cinematic history.

Shea said, “When we are young, we drink our coffee with milk and sugar. And as we age, we drink it with milk only, then we drink it black, then we drink it decaf, then we die. Our next eater is at decaf.”

“He stands before us like Hercules himself, albeit a large bald Hercules at an eating contest.”

Over one hundred and fifty years ago, the American humorist Josh Billings wrote, “I honestly believe it is better to know nothing than to know what ain’t so.” And that seems to me the underlying problem—not just with CNN and other cable news networks, but with contemporary information flow in general. So often, I end up knowing what just ain’t so. In

Vincent Millay: My candle burns at both ends; It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends— It gives a lovely light!

Susan Sontag wrote that “Depression is melancholy minus its charms.” For me, living with depression was at once utterly boring and absolutely excruciating.

In Darkness Visible, William Styron’s wrenching memoir of depression, he wrote, “What makes the condition intolerable is the foreknowledge that no remedy will come—not in a day, an hour, a month, or a minute. If there is mild relief, one knows that it is only temporary; more pain will follow. It is hopelessness even more than pain that crushes the soul.”

“I’ve wrestled with reality for thirty-five years, Doctor, and I’m happy to state I finally won out over

“Years ago my mother used to say to me, she’d say . . . ‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”