📚 The Anthropocene Reviewed

This would have been a great opportunity to use “The Anthropocene Reviewed, reviewed” if not for the sake of my conforming to consistent title format for book review posts. Alas, the pun is already used in one of the episodes of the author’s podcast of the same name.

I discovered this book through Goodreads’ annual choice awards. I’ve read and appreciated John Green’s fiction before, so I decided to give this non-fiction work of his made during the pandemic a try.

Reviewing anything and everything that humans experience as a collective isn’t a new idea. I can think of one recent example on top of my head. Neal Agawal who made the famous Password Puzzle has a game named “Earth Reviews” where topics like math gets less than three stars and cats get more than four out of five stars. Anyone can also leave a review that goes along with their rating.

Unlike Earth Reviews, The Anthropocene Reviewed includes much less general topics and explores each with much more depth, based on John Green’s personal experience. Many topics are US-specific, so it reads a lot like an autobiography that covers personal growth and development at times. Chapters are not chronologically ordered either; it can be considered a compilation of personal essays with ratings out of five stars included at the end of each chapter.

I started reading in 2023 and removed the book from my “currently reading” to my “DNF” shelf several times in the past two years. I’ve only picked it up recently for the lack of better books to read (that is, books that could fit my frighteningly precise mood at a given point in time, last year).

The reviews started off amazing. It began with reviews of topics such as humans’ temporal range, our capacity for wonder, and sunsets. It was filled with great insights and set a relaxing yet worldly scene for the stage. It gave me high hopes for what was to come.

Alas, the middle one third of the book wasn’t so interesting. It seemed as though the author was only describing personal accounts of little significance or lessons to be learned. It felt a little disconnected from the great start.

One might argue that the disconnect in the middle chapters should be blamed on my discontinuing the book after the first few chapters. But surely there should be a reason for why I felt compelled to put it off in the first place, shouldn’t there?

Luckily, I churned through the middle and finally it transitioned to a satisfying, rather existential end.

The ending was good enough that I was not only left satiated with an existential crisis, I was also reminded of how well the book began.

Overall, the reviews were insightful. I really enjoyed reading about John Green’s life in America, his travels and his perspective in things we all give little thought to each day. I’ll give it 4.5 out of 5 stars.

# Quotes

Making conclusions about a book’s quality from a 175-word review is hard work for artificial intelligences, whereas star ratings are ideal for them.

I’m reminded of something my religion professor Donald Rogan told me once: “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.”

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.

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.

On air-conditioning:

Like most other energy-intensive innovations, AC primarily benefits people in rich communities, while the consequences of climate change are borne disproportionately by people in impoverished communities.

A blog in the Atlantic wrote, “To think the temperature in a building is sexist is absurd.” But it’s not absurd. 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.

In the chapter about Staphylococcus aureus, John Green quotes an exchange between Alexander Ogston who discovered Staphylococcus and Joseph Lister who revolutionized the craft of surgery through his research into sterilization techniques:

“You have changed surgery… from being a hazardous lottery into a safe and soundly based science,” which was only a bit of an exaggeration.

After visiting Lister and observing complex knee surgeries healing without infection, Ogston returned to the hospital in Aberdeen and tore down the sign above the operating room that read, “Prepare to meet thy God.” No longer would surgery be a last-ditch, desperate effort.

On sunsets, and Indianapolis:

I don’t buy the romantic notion that scientific understanding somehow robs the universe of its beauty, but I still can’t find language to describe how breathtakingly beautiful sunsets are—not breathtakingly, actually, but breath-givingly beautiful.

Indianapolis’s favorite literary son, Kurt Vonnegut, wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

And finally, a few final quotes from the postscript.

Hank Green likes to remind me that I am made out of the materials of the universe, that I contain nothing but those materials. “Really,” he told me once, “you’re just a hunk of Earth trying to sustain a departure from chemical equilibrium.”

In a song he wrote years ago called “The Universe Is Weird,” Hank sings that the weirdest thing is that, in us, “the universe created a tool with which to know itself.”

When I think of how I have enjoyed the Anthropocene so far, I think of Robert Frost, who wrote, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.” So it is with poems, and so it is with us. Like ice on a hot stove, we must ride on a melting Earth, all the while knowing who is melting it. A species that has only ever found its way to more must now find its way to less.