The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
John Green (Dutton, 2021)
John Green has been a book reviewer and a novelist, and, more recently, a podcaster. This book would probably make a great audio book, since some of it was originally written for the podcast. I think that has influenced the writing toward smoothness and lucidity, and toward a very personal point of view. The fact that podcasts became a common reality only in this century is a pretty good example of what the essays are about: we are surfing on our own history, and it might be well to take a good look around.
The Anthropocene, for one thing, is what many geologists are calling the era we’re living in, when human activity is having measurable effects on conditions on earth. We live in a world partly of our making, right down to the temperature of the sky and the sea. Nothing else on earth can escape our influence, either, which is appalling to remember, because we have certainly set forces in motion that we neither understand nor control.
The internet, of course, is one such force. There’d be almost no way to go back and decode the algorithms that know us so well, if we have any kind of presence online, whether we’re reading, shopping, or listening. Google music wants a thumbs up or down, to tune itself to my taste; Google and Amazon want reviews on a scale of five stars. “The five-star scale doesn’t really exist for humans; it exists for data aggregation systems, which is why it did not become standard until the internet era.”
And now it’s everywhere. “The five-star scale was applied not just to books and films but to public restrooms and wedding photographers. The medication I take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 1,100 ratings at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8.” Green cheekily stretches the form by applying the system to Diet Dr. Pepper, Teddy bears, and Canada geese, but he does so in a familiar and recognizable way. In his early drafts, he tried to write from a disinterested, ‘neutral’ point of view, as he had when he reviewed books in for Booklist. Fortunately, his wife turned him around, pointing out that “in the Anthropocene, there are no disinterested observers; there are only participants.” If you love Diet Dr. Pepper, and hate Canada geese, you might as well say so.
“With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most of us.” Would you believe they had almost been hunted to extinction a hundred year ago? Now they live nearly everywhere we plant Kentucky bluegrass, which is pretty much everywhere, between lawns, parks and golf courses. “Like us, the success of their species has affected their habitats: A single Canada goose can produce up to one hundred pounds of excrement per year, which has led to unsafe E. coli levels in lakes and ponds where they gather. And like us, geese have few natural predators. If they die by violence, it is almost always human violence. Just like us.” The geese end up with a lowly two stars.
There’s a marvelous range to this book, from the minute (Staphylococcus aureus) to the immense (Halley’s Comet); from the very old (the Ginkgo Tree) to the very new (Super Mario Kart); from the general (Sunsets) to the particular (Jerzy Dudek’s performance [as a soccer goalie] on May 25th, 2005); from the sublime (Our Capacity for Wonder) to the ridiculous (The World’s Largest Ball of Paint.) And everything, so to speak, in between.
And what could be more in between than Indianapolis? Green lives there because his wife has an art museum job there; they live in one of the economically and racially diverse ZIP codes in the United States. It’s a place so average as to be almost a joke: “The city’s nicknames include ‘Naptown,’ because it’s boring, and ‘India-no-place.’” But it’s also a place where people meet up with friends and ride their bikes out to the Speedway to watch the Indy 500, along with a quarter million or so other people. In 2020, when Covid-19 stopped the race, Green and his buddies made the trip anyway, just for the joy of it.
Read this book, or listen to it, just for the joy of it.
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