The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet by John Green. 

5/5 rating. 274 pages.

Book #40 of 2023. Read September 17, 2023.

This book is the outgrowth of quite possibly my favorite podcast of all time.

After listening to all 37 episodes of John’s podcast (multiple times) where he “reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a 5-star scale” I finally realized that my library probably had the book and immediately checked it out and began reading (in John’s voice after hearing it so much).

This book is one of those incredible and perfect coffee-table books: it includes short chapters and way more facts than you could ever remember, all tied up in beautiful stories of how the reviewed item or concept deserves its rating.

John’s writing is vulnerable and touching and honest. His anecdotes about life and quotes about disparate topics make hard days easier and mundane ones beautiful. I find his neuroticism endearing in a way that often makes me chuckle at his needling of his own insecurities.

I wish there was more of an eloquent description that I could include to impart how much I love this book and the podcast, but I’ll let John’s writing do some of the work:

My favorite quotes:

“Above all, I wanted to understand the contradictions of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough.”

“For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars.”

“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.”

“Part of our fears about the world ending must stem from the strange reality that for each of us our world will end, and soon.”

“Put another way: In 2021, we are five human lifetimes removed from the building of the Taj Mahal, and two lifetimes removed from the abolition of slavery in the United States. History, like human life, is at once incredibly fast and agonizingly slow.”

“These days, the world contains between four and six million Canada geese, although from where I’m sitting in Indianapolis, that estimate feels low, as there appear to be four to six million of them currently resisting in my backyard.”

“It’s hard to understand how dominant our species has become, but I sometimes find it helpful to consider it purely in terms of mass: The 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.”

“That’s not the astonishing thing about the story, though. The astonishing thing is that after scraping off the mold that became the world’s penicillin supply, the researchers ATE THE CANTALOUPE.”

“When you have the microphone, what you say matters, even when you’re just kidding. It’s so easy to take refuge in the ‘just’ of just kidding. It’s just a joke. We’re just doing it for the memes. But the preposterous and absurd can still shape our understanding of ourselves and one another. And ridiculous cruelty is still cruel.”

“[CNN creator, Ted] Turner said [the day of launch,] ‘You’ll notice out in front of me that we’ve raised three flags – one, the state of Georgia; second, the United States flag of course, which represents our country and the way we intend to serve it with the Cable News Network; and over on the other side we have the flag of the United Nations, because we hope that the Cable News Network with its international coverage and greater depth coverage will bring a better understanding of how people from different nations live and work together, so that we can perhaps hopefully bring together in brotherhood and kindness and friendship and peace the people of this nation and this world.’”

“The word news tells a secret on itself, though: What’s news isn’t primarily what is noteworthy or important, but what is new. So much of what actually changes in human life isn’t driven by events, but instead by processes, which often aren’t considered news.”

“A 2017 study found that 74 percent of Americans believe that global child mortality has either stayed the same or gotten worse in the last twenty years, when in fact, it has declined by almost 60 percent since 1990, by far the fastest decline in child death in any thirty-year period in human history.”

“Depression is melancholy minus its charms.”

“I thought the problem was me, at my core. I was worthless, useless, helpless, hopeless. I was less and less each day.”

“Despite not being a traditional hero of any kind, Elwood is profoundly heroic. In my favorite line of the movie, he says, ‘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.’”

“[Elwood] showed me that you could be crazy and still be human, still be valuable, and still be loved. Elwood offered me a kind of hope that wasn’t bullshit, and in doing so helped me to see that hope is the correct response to the strange, often terrifying miracle of consciousness. Hope is not easy or cheap. It is true.”

“When people we love are suffering, we want to make it better. But sometimes – often, in fact, you can’t make it better. I’m reminded of something my supervisor said to me when I was a student chaplain: ‘Don’t just do something. Stand there.’”

“Death may be knocking at my door, but I’m not getting out of this glorious bath to answer it.”

“But more land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined.”

“Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S. – clean, drinkable water – is dedicated to lawns.”

“To minimize weeds and make our lawns as thickly monocultured as possible, Americans use ten times more fertilizer and pesticide per acre of turfgrass than is used in corn or wheat fields. To keep all the lawns in the U.S. green year-round requires, according to a NASA study, around two hundred gallons of water per person per day, and almost all of the water shooting from sprinklers os treated drinking water. Grass clippings and other yard waste constitute 12 percent of all the material that ends up in U.S. landfills. And then there is the direct financial outlay: We spend tens of billions of dollars a year on lawn maintenance.”

“Tradition is a way of being with people, not just the people you’re observing the traditions with now, but also all those who’ve ever observed them.”

“And like life, your friends get mad if you take their money, and then no matter how rich you are, there’s an ever-expanding void inside of you that money can never fill, but gripped by the madness of unregulated enterprise you nonetheless believe that if you just get a couple more hotels or take from your friends their few remaining dollars, you will at last feel complete.”

“Sarah is, by a wide margin, my favorite person. After the death of the poet Jane Kenyon, her husband Donald Hall wrote, ‘We did not spend our days gazing into each other’s eyes. We did that gazing when we made love or when one of us was in trouble, but most of the time our gazes met and entwined as they looked at a third thing. Third things are essential to marriages, objects or practices or habits or arts or institutions or games or human beings that provide a site od joint rapture or contentment. Each member of a couple is separate; the two come together in double attention.’”

“I know we’ve left scars everywhere, and that our obsessive desire to make and have and do and say and go and get – six of the seven most common verbs in English – may ultimately steal away our ability to be, the most common verb in English.”

“Being busy is a way of being loud. And what my daughter needed was quiet space, for her small voice to be heard.”

“Maybe we forget so that we can go on.”

“What you’re looking at matters, but not as much as how you’re looking or who you’re looking with. That night, I was with just the right person in just the right place, and I’ll be damned if the graupel wasn’t beautiful.”

“One day I was at church, and the gospel reading included Matthew 19:24, which goes, ‘Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter rhe Kingdom of God.’ The minister said that people take every line of the Bible literally except for that one, when it is the only line that is meant literally.”

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

The simplest way to sum up this book in true @johngreenwritesbooks fashion, is “I give ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’ 5-stars.”

#johngreen #theanthropocenereviewed #bookrecommendations #lovethisbook

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