The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. 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. It is to hold your children while they cry, to watch as the sycamore trees leaf out in June.”

The world is awe-inspiring, and the people in it, for all their flaws, are a source of amazement. Sometimes our loved ones suffer or die, and if we turn away from that pain, we miss the love. Meanwhile, in our rush to achieve, we don’t notice the world around us or our damaging effects on it. Opening oneself to hurt as well as awe is better because doing so keeps the heart compassionate and makes the mind wise.

“Humans are already an ecological catastrophe. In just 250,000 years, our behavior has led to the extinction of many species, and driven many more into steep decline. This is lamentable, and it is also increasingly needless. We probably didn’t know what we were doing thousands of years ago as we hunted some large mammals to extinction. But we know what we’re doing now. We know how to tread more lightly upon the earth. We could choose to use less energy, eat less meat, clear fewer forests. And we choose not to. As a result, for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.”

Humans often fear that the world might end. Ironically, people already have caused the end of many life forms on Earth. An even darker irony is that humans might cause their own end through the neglect of those life forms. This truth confronts us all, yet we turn away just when we need to respond to it.

“[A]esthetic 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.”

Wonder lies all around us, yet we pass by, encumbered by our worries, too rushed to contemplate all the beauty. Anything that can bring us back to awareness of our connection to the world is worth encouraging. A child gazing at a leaf may appear to be idling away her time, but that gaze beholds something essential to a good life.

“So much of what feels inevitably, inescapably human to me is in fact very, very new, including the everywhereness of the Canada goose. So I feel unsettled about the Canada goose—both as a species and as a symbol. In a way, it has become my biggest fear.”

Our perspective looks across years and sees sameness, but decades and centuries tell a different story—one of relentless change. To a young person, Canada geese have always been here, when in fact they nearly died out in the 1930s. Their reappearance testifies not only to the success of human efforts to revive them but also in a larger sense to the enormity of humanity’s impact on nature.

“As a teen, I liked to imagine what life might be like if we all stopped believing in these constructs. What would happen if we abandoned the idea of the U.S. Constitution being the ruling document of our nation, or the idea of nation-states altogether? Perhaps it is a symptom of middle age that I now want to imagine better nation-states (and better-regulated private corporations) rather than leaving behind these ideas. 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.”

Our governments and corporations labor to convince us that they’re worthwhile and worth protecting. Their histories, though, often belie their claims. Citizens must remain vigilant and hold their large institutions to account so that they persist not for their own sake but because they’re worthy of our best aspirations.

“Staphylococcus doesn’t want to harm people. It doesn’t know about people. It just wants to be, like I want to go on, like that ivy wants to spread across the wall, occupying more and more of it. How much? As much as it can. It’s not staph’s fault that it wants to be. Nonetheless, I give Staphylococcus aureus one star.”

Life seeks to continue any way it can. Sometimes that causes other life forms to die. This battle never ends; it’s inevitable, but blaming life for this battle is difficult to do even when it causes us to suffer.

“[W]hen 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.”

Though the digital world has long since taken over a huge swath of Green’s life, he has mixed feelings about it. He wonders what he may have missed during his time online—and whether the internet affects our attitudes and beliefs for better or worse. Getting perspective on a major cultural and historical change is hard to do when you’re in the midst of it; only time will tell.

“There’s something deep within me, something intensely fragile, that is terrified of turning itself to the world. I’m scared to even write this down, because I worry that having confessed this fragility, you now know where to punch.”

Like Green’s puppy, who would roll over and turn its belly up for a scratch—trusting that his humans wouldn’t hurt him in his most vulnerable spot—everyone has fragile feelings that others can crush. We’re tempted to hide those vulnerabilities behind a wall of cynicism. However, only when we make ourselves open to the beauty of the world, despite other people’s objections or cruel retorts, can we see deeply into the wonder of life.

“[O]f all the unimportant things, football is the most important […].”

This saying, attributed to Pope John Paul II, perfectly describes most soccer-football fans’ attitude toward the game they love. It also captures Green’s passion for the Liverpool Football Club and epitomizes a feeling common to many people, who live for unimportant, non-serious things that make life worthwhile rather than for the serious duties that make it possible.

“I mostly try to act like everyone else is acting, even as we all approach the precipice. We imagine other animals as being without consciousness, mindlessly following the leader to they-know-not-where, but in that construction, we sometimes forget that we are also animals.”

People tend to follow the crowd, and sometimes the crowd heads in a bad direction. As we approach the cliff edge of an environmental catastrophe, we keep moving blindly forward, heedless of the danger, because, so far, the path is straight and level. We may lack the ability to deal successfully with some of the problems we’ve created: Our minds simply don’t register the danger on that scale, and our follow-the-crowd instincts overrule our more sensible concerns.

“It says so much about contemporary American life that our Independence Day celebrations include 1. fireworks displays, which are essentially imitation battles complete with rockets and bombs, and 2. a contest in which people from around the world attempt to discover how many hot dogs and buns can be ingested by a human within ten minutes. To quote the legendary comedian Yakov Smirnoff: What a country.”

We celebrate American independence with fireworks, which symbolize the war colonists fought to be free, and with contests to stuff oneself with as many franks as possible. The fireworks glorify conflict, while the hot dogs symbolize overdoing things. If Americans gained their liberty only to turn ravenous gluttony into a contest, history may have taken a wrong turn.

“I find hopelessness to be a kind of pain. One of the worst kinds. For me, finding hope is not some philosophical exercise or sentimental notion; it is a prerequisite for my survival.”

Green has experienced severe bouts of depression, the hallmark of which is a feeling of hopelessness—that one’s life will never really be worthwhile. His writing is an attempt to reconcile his fears that humanity will ruin itself with his hope that people will instead evolve into a thriving, loving, beautiful community for all. His writing is the engine that powers his hope, which in turn keeps him going.

“How can you regain confidence when you know that confidence is just a varnish painted atop human frailty?”

Many of the book’s essays illustrate how humans, despite their best intentions, can do things that create problems, even chaos. Sports stars can play brilliantly for years and then suddenly get “the yips,” a sudden loss of confidence and ability that sometimes never goes away. This points to how arbitrary life can be, giving so much yet sometimes suddenly taking away. Confidence, then, isn’t so much the certainty that things will go well but the knowledge that no matter what happens a person can play through, keep going, and find a solution.

“I am trying to create a stable community in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured. And you gotta do that somewhere. When I am sick with the disease of loneliness, good weather and shimmering skyscrapers do me no good whatsoever, as a writer or as a person. I must be home to do the work I need to do.”

It’s always fashionable to put down average places, especially in America, but these spots are where real people live and work—and where they search for love and community. Green resisted the normalcy of Indianapolis until he realized that the problem wasn’t other people failing to live up to his expectations but the expectations themselves. When he saw his neighbors for who they really were—human beings—he began to love and appreciate them and their community. Thus, he found a sense of belonging from normal people all around him rather than from some idealized urban enclave, and that’s what makes him feel at home.

“[I]t’s been my experience that almost everything easy to mock turns out to be interesting if you pay closer attention.”

Green likes to watch human activity from different angles. At first, he might cringe at the inanity, waste, or callousness of some event or thing—hot dog eating contests, lawns, auto races, air conditioning—and then he looks at the other side to see what’s beneficial or amazing about these things. This affords him two perspectives: first, that things which aren’t cool or hip can still be wonderful, and second, that humans are at once wondrous and dangerous creatures who might bring paradise or disaster to Earth.

“We cannot seem to resist the urge to win. Whether it’s climbing El Capitan or going to space, we want to do it, but we also want to do it before anyone else, or faster than anyone else. This drive has pushed us forward as a species—but I worry it has also pushed us in other directions.”

The human need to win has brought civilization many beneficial advances but also puts people—and sometimes entire societies—at risk. Trying to be the biggest, best, fastest, or wealthiest has pulled nations into war, damaged ecosystems, and overwhelmed important values. Green frets that our yearning to achieve new heights might also be our undoing as a species.

“The fact that our political, social, and economic systems are biased in favor of the already rich and the already powerful is the single greatest failure of the American democratic ideal. I have benefited from this, directly and profoundly, for my entire life. Almost every time I’ve driven through a question box in my life, I’ve been given at the very least a red turtle shell. It happens so routinely that it’s easy for those of us who benefit from these power-ups to see them as fair. But if I don’t grapple with the reality that I owe much of my success to injustice, I’ll only further the hoarding of wealth and opportunity.”

The computer racing game Super Mario Kart awards power-ups to players as they wind along the racecourse, and players in the rear get more powerful power-ups than those in the lead, which makes the game fairer. In real life, it’s the other way around: The successful get more and better advantages than those just starting out or those who have experienced significant failure. Green expresses feelings of guilt about his own success—which, though it stems from his ability as a writer and communicator, also benefits from unfair power-ups like being white, male, college-educated, and so forth. If he accepts those advantages as his due, he contributes to the problem instead of the solution.

“For some reason, I really like casinos. I recognize that they prey on vulnerable people and enable addiction, and that they’re loud and smoky and gross and horrible. But I can’t help myself.”

Green finds himself drawn to things that he regards as basically bad for people. He doesn’t have a perverse need to do bad things; rather, he thinks that many things that people love—things that big corporations promote—turn out to be bad for them, for others, or for the environment. His enjoyment of these things or activities—the Indy 500 or Diet Dr Pepper or casinos, for example—speaks to their common, all-too-human popularity, and he ponders what makes them so attractive despite their bad sides.

“Loss can be so encompassing—it’s a job where the hours are all hours, every day. We talk of grief in stages—denial, bargaining, acceptance, and so on. But for me, at least, grief is a series of tightly packed circles that fade over many years, like ink exposed to light.”

For Green, loss and grief can overwhelm, and sometimes he finds relief in simple, repetitive behaviors, like autograph signing, which he’s done 500,000 times and counting. He understands well the motives behind artist Hiroyuki Doi’s drawings of thousands of circles—how their obsessive repetitiveness underlined their curative powers as they soothed Doi’s grief after the death of a cherished brother. The act of repeating, over and over, can calm the mind and make unbearable loss tolerable—enough so that we can simply sit with our sadness until, finally, just being is enough. In addition, if a repetitive act produces art, it can contribute value to others.

“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.”

Central to Green’s ideas about the human predicament is the difference between our ambition to improve our lives and the beauty of the world around us, a beauty that needs no improvement. In effect, we rush past the experiences we crave because we’re so busy trying to find them—and thus lose the ability to simply be.

“So we got in the sauna and I was so drunk that I was pouring cold beer over my head to stay cool in the sauna, and then after a while Sarah and I stepped outside and walked knee-deep into the lake. The eighty-year-old patriarch whose name was I think Lasse joined us, and he was standing there completely nude, next to the ridiculously modest Americans in their bathing suits. And then Lasse clapped me on the back in what was intended to be a firm gesture of camaraderie. Unprepared for the strength of his embrace, I fell face-first into the lake.”

During a trip to Sweden, Green suffered a hilariously embarrassing moment, and he writes about it in terms that recall the best of Kurt Vonnegut. Green suffers from serious self-doubt, yet he’s willing to see himself dispassionately. As a writer, he can transform his insecurities and awkward social moments into amusing and sometimes insightful observations.

“What’s most interesting to me about humanity is not what our individual members do, but the kinds of systems we build and maintain together. The light bulb is cool and everything, but what’s really cool is the electrical grid used to power it.”

The idea of working together in a community to build good things—relationships, products, activities—appeals strongly to Green. The result might be overblown, like the Indy 500, or boringly average, like Indianapolis, but what matters is the community that built it and how that process helped bring those people together. Green understands that lone geniuses can’t change the world without help from thousands of others; to him, that ability to build together—not mere individual brilliance—is what makes the human species great.

“What’s even the point? All this trial and travail for what will become nothing, and soon. Sitting in the airport, I’m disgusted by my excesses, my failures, my pathetic attempts to forge some meaning or hope from the materials of this meaningless world. I’ve been tricking myself, thinking there was some reason for all of it, thinking that consciousness was a miracle when it’s really a burden, thinking that to be alive was wondrous when it’s really a terror. The plain fact, my brain tells me when it plays this game, is that the universe doesn’t care if I’m here.”

When he feels depressed, Green plays his game of “What’s even the point?” and it traps him in a loop of psychological pain. He finds no value even in ridding himself of the game, since the game implies that his life has no worthwhile future. This process makes him doubt his artistic efforts, which in his calmer moments he considers the game’s worst effect on him. He yearns to believe in life, though, and eventually returns to that stance.