In our one on one meetings on Thursday, two of my first year students mentioned John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed, a title I'd seen but not followed up, so I took advantage of Amazon Prime and got myself a copy I could brandish when class officially begins Tuesday. (It's even signed!)
Green, Wikipedia helpfully informs me, is "an American author and YouTube content creator." He's written bestselling books, several of them for young adults, and with his brother Hank created a small menagerie of more than a little hyperactive geeky YouTube programs. (I've seen some.) More recently he created a monthly podcast for WNYC called "The Anthropocene Reviewed," with a much more laconic style, and it's a condensation of these podcasts which appeared in book form a few months ago. I'm a latecomer to his prolific multi-platform oeuvre, and arrive just in time for something of a shift.
This latest project, Green tells us, was an attempt to share more of himself. The project riffs on a remark made by his wife Sarah about the reviews which have become ubiquitous online.
She explained that when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir - here's what my experience was eating at this restaurant or getting my hair cut at this barbershop. (6)
One of Green's first jobs was writing 175-word reviews for BookList, so this is a kind of return. Also from BookList, but in conversration with all those online reviewers, he's ended each of his brief chapters with a score from 1 to 5. But unlike in his BookList days, these judgments are explicitly personal: memoir. Sarah also observed that in the Anthropocene there are no detached observers, as the earlier kinds of reviews like BookList's imagined, just participants. The score isn't intended to decide for us but to invite us to experience things for ourselves.
You get a sense of the sorts of things reviewed from the first few - "You'll never walk alone," Humanity's Temporal Range, Halley's Comet, Our Capacity for Wonder, Lascaux Cave Paintings, Scratch 'n; Sniff Stickers, Diet Dr Pepper, Velociraptors, Canada Geese - but not for the little ruminations they inspire, which include personal anecdotes, unexpected histories, quirky factoids, and perfectly placed nuggets of wisdom from luminaries. How poignant is the thought that our young species is wiping out species many times its age? That, having discovered that our breathing damages them, we agreed to close the Lascaux caves and created a simulacrum next door? That Canada geese are thriving, in part because the seeds of Kentucky bluegrass we cultivate in all our lawns are a favorite food for them? That Scratch ' n' Sniff stickers, which never quite smelled like what they claimed to, might outlast the things they don't quite smell like? "Canada Geese," by the way, was the start of the project. He'd written a "review of Canada geese" as a lark and told his brother about it. "Hank said, 'The Anthropocene . . . REVIEWED.'" (5) And John was off. His working definition of Anthropocene, incidentally, is a lived paradox.
I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to reshape Earth's climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them. We are so powerful that we have escaped our planet's atmosphere. But we are not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering. (6)
But as an individual I don't feel that power. I can't decide whether a species lives or dies. I can't even get my kids to eat breakfast. (58)
The essays - I've only read the ones I mentioned and a few near the end - are essentially personal essays. Green marshals considerable erudition but wears his knowledge lightly. When a great insight appears, it's always credited to someone else - like Sarah or Hank - and the modesty seems genuine. He has a good eye for suggestive and resonant images and anecdotes. And, so far at least, he likes what he writes about. The scores of those first chapters, respectively, are 4.5, 4, 4.5, 3.5, 4.5, 3.5, 4, 3 and 2. At the book's end he makes clear that what he's exploring and sharing is his love for the world, something he tells us he came to only reccently. Also at work is what he calls radical hope. Overwhelmed though we are we mustn't despair.
For most of my life, I've beleived that we're in the fourth quarter of human history, and perhaps even the last days of it. But lately, I've come to believe that such despair only worsen our already slim chance at long-term survival. We must gifght like there is something to fight for, like we are something worth figfhting for, because we are. And so I choose to believe that we are not approaching the apocalypse, that the end is not coming, and that we weill find a way to survive the coming changes.
"Change," Octavia Butler wrote, "is the one unavoidable, irresistible, ongoing reality of the universe." And who am I to say that we are done changing? (20-21)
In a postscript he mentions that the title of the German translation of the book is Wie hat Ihenen das Antrhopzän bis jetzt gefallen? (How have you enjoyed the Anthropocene so far?) and runs with it. That the book appeared in translation first is the sort of chronology-defying twist he specializes in.
How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It is wondrous! In high school, my best friend, Todd, and I went to the dollar movie theater every Wednesday. We watched whatever movie was playing on the frigid theater's single screen. Once, a werewolf movie staring Jack Nicholson and Michelle Pfeiffer played at the theater for eight straight Wednesdays, so we watched it eight times The movie, which was terrible, got better and better the more we watched it. ...
How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It's awful! I feel that I am not evolved enough for this. I have only been here for a little while, but already I have seen my kind extinguish the last remaining member of many other kinds ... "I smell the wound and it smells me," Terry Tempest Williams writes in Erosion. I live in a wounded world, and I now I am the wound: Earth destroying Earth with Earth. (273)
You get a sense of his wry style, tenderness and unassuming eloquence.
But I had to see how the German edition of The Anthropocene Reviewed - it's been out longer than the English one - was reviewed. What would German book reviewers make of this scattershot essayistic episodic project? After initial misgivings at the seeming crassness of the scoring at each chapter's end, the reviewers seem all to have been won over by the profundity of the book's lightness. Many play along and give it a score, 4 or even 5.
I'll need to read more, but for now I find myself intrigued by something I haven't encountered before: an engagement with the Anthropocene that's entirely outside the world of academia (or art or religion). The materials I'm familiar with are urgent and impassioned, high-minded debates about what the Anthropocene is, what it means, who is responsible and what is to be done. This is something entirely different. The 1 to 5 scoring seems like a bemused, even consumerist stance detached from the world, but in Green's use is really an effort at sustaining a grounded and hopeful participation in it.
