The Anthropocene Reviewed

by John Green

“I cry a lot because I miss people. I cry a lot because they die, and I can’t stop them. They leave me, and I love them more.”

This is how love feels to me. I also think this is why I have loved hard and know that I care about others.

We may feel alone (in fact, we will feel alone), but even in the crushing grind of isolation, we aren’t alone.

Loneliness used to be my worst fear but now I actually like it

When you measure time in Halleys rather than years, history starts to look different.

History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.

find it so comforting that we do know when Halley will return, and that it will return, whether we are here to see it or not.

Smith’s book was one of the few books by women included in the program; the vast majority were written by white men.

“Books are weapons in the war of ideas,”

Gatsby is a critique of the American Dream. The only people who end up rich or successful in the novel are the ones who start out that way. Almost everyone else ends up dead or destitute. 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.

Still, I’m fond of our capacity for wonder.

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art

This is a memory that you cannot return to. And

to me, that makes the cave very much like the past it represents.

In fact, while I’ve been making distinctions between natural scents and artificial ones, at this point in our planet’s story, many purportedly natural scents are already shaped by human intervention, including the banana.

“you cannot tell anyone what Dr Pepper tastes like because it’s so different. It’s not an apple; it’s not an orange; it’s not a strawberry; it’s not a root beer; it’s not even a cola.” Cola, after all, is derived from kola nuts and vanilla, two real-world flavors. Sprite has that lemon-lime taste. Purple soda is ostensibly grape-flavored. But Dr Pepper has no natural-world analogue.

There remains a yearning within my subconscious that cries out for a sacrifice, and so I offer up a faint shadow of a proper vice and drink Diet Dr Pepper, the soda that tastes more like the Anthropocene than any other.

And so our image of velociraptors says more about us than it does about them.

This can also be something applied to people today. We make assumptions and view things a certain way and this affects the narrative of many people’s lives.

endlessly shaped by assumptions and presuppositions,

Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph”—and

And like us, geese have few natural predators. If they die by violence, it is almost always human violence. Just like us.

You can do something about abandonment. You can construct a stronger independent self, for instance, or build a broader network of meaningful relationships so your psychological well-being isn’t wholly reliant upon one person.

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.

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

Many linguists believe these names are substitutes, created because speaking or writing the actual word for bear was considered taboo.

As those in the wizarding world of Harry Potter were taught never to say “Voldemort,”

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.”

“have tied me to a stake; I cannot fly, / But, bear-like, I must fight the course.”

I love Shakespeare being ahead of his time but still very much in his time.

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.

Their survival is contingent upon our wisdom and compassion—just as that bear in Mississippi needed Roosevelt to be kind.

The same could be said about the human race

Can cuteness save a species? I’m dubious. The part of the teddy bear origin story that often doesn’t get told is that right after Roosevelt sportingly refused to kill the bear, he ordered a member of his hunting party to slit its throat, so as to put the bear out of its misery.

My friends and I had a word for the artificiality and corporatized fantasy of pop music and theme parks and cheerful movies: We called all of it “plastic.”

Donald Trump uttered a few sentences, including, “Above all, to be an American is to be an optimist,” which is just a fundamental misunderstanding of how citizenship gets conferred in nation-states.

John green thanks for calling out his BS

I would argue it is an idea with a proud history. But it is also an idea with many other histories—a shameful history, an oppressive history, and a violent history, among others.

This is exactly why so many people aren’t proud to be Americans. I am happy or was happy and prideful that we stand for things that many other countries don't. I am not going to ignore the sacrifices our people have made for centuries. Aside from that though we cannot ignore the problems. Our history has some bad things along side the good and our current governmental leaders are not something to be proud of

But we cannot do the hard work of imagining a better world into existence unless we reckon honestly with what governments and corporations want us to believe, and why they want us to believe it.

One of the reasons for this huge shift in human geography is the miracle of air-conditioning, which allows people to control the temperature of their interior spaces.

Climate-controlled drug storage remains one of the big challenges for healthcare systems in poor countries, where many health facilities have no electricity.

heat waves cause more deaths than lightning, tornadoes, hurricanes, floods, and earthquakes combined.

the wealthier parts of the world, heat is now more of a health problem in mild climates than in hot ones.

Most of the energy that powers air-conditioning systems comes from fossil fuels, the use of which warms the planet, which over time will necessitate more and more conditioning of air.

I assume the history classes of the future will have successfully boiled down into a single narrative.

This has already happened because we want to emphasize a certain narrative about history especially American history and filtering black and indigenous history in America. We don't want to seem like the bad guys .I think it Will definitely happen in relation to Science and Climate.

Perhaps because the definition of “room temperature” has historically been established by analyzing the temperature preferences of forty-year-old, 154-pound men wearing business suits. Studies have consistently found that on average women prefer warmer indoor temperatures.

But when people point out the bias of AC settings in office buildings—especially when women point it out—they’ve often been mocked for being overly sensitive.

What’s “natural” for humans is always changing.

“Only the strong survive” and “survival of the fittest” and feeling terrified, because I knew I was neither strong nor fit. I didn’t yet understand that when humanity protects the frail among us, and works to ensure their survival, the human project as a whole gets stronger.

Peoria.*

Okay the fact that the researchers ate the rest of the Cantalope is crazy

To me, one of the mysteries of life is why life wants to be.

It just wants to be, like I want to go on,

And paradoxically, because they didn’t know me, they knew me far better than anyone in my real life.

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