I took the "Anthropocene Humanities" class to Minetta Triangle today, a walk I've taken past classes on where we try to sense the Minetta Creek flowing beneath the surface of the city. It takes imagination to feel anything (or a dowsing stick, a student proposed), but in this tiny park there's an effort to recreate the stream with outlines of fish disporting themselves inscribed in the stones of the meandering walkway.
I'd wanted to take the class here for a while but today, our first daylight savings time class and a bright warm day, seemed cut out for it. Last week we'd looked at work pointing toward indigenous ways of understanding land, of caring for country, so a walking acknowledgment of the original denizens of the island of Mannahatta seemed appropriate, even if in the rueful form of Minetta Triangle's stone epitaphs. Fish there may no longer be here but the creek flows still and might appreciate a visit. This gently complicated memorial resonated also, I thought, with the wistful mood of today's readings - selections from John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed. (We read the introduction and postscript and eight chapters which give a sense of his omnivorous curiosity: “You’ll Never Walk Alone,” Humanity’s Temporal Range, Lascaux Cave Paintings, Scratch ‘n’ Sniff Stickers, Canada Geese, Sunsets, Piggly Wiggly, Kentucky Bluegrass, Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance. The essays connect anecdotes and suprising histories with reflections on living in a time when we're "so powerful that we have escaped our planet's atmosphere" but "not powerful enough to save those we love from suffering.")
As it turned out the little park's gate was locked, however, so we had to make do with peering over the fence (where the unseasonal seeming azalea above caught my eye). A locked park is totally John Green material too, a student ventured gamely. I'm not sure I know what he was referring to but I appreciated the gesture. Before our little stroll I'd had students analyze our selections from Green's book - what's the project? how do the individual chapters contribute to it? - ending with the prompt to draft a chapter on a topic of their own which they might add to the book's project as they understood it. I thought the Minetta Triangle fish would suit; their proposals were less recherché and perhaps closer in spirit to Green!
Discussing the book with them had disclosed what a curious enterprise his book is. It didn't even start out as a book but as a series of podcasts, and we talked about how it has some of the laconic aesthetic of podcasts - quite different from the hyperactive nerdiness of the educational videos through which they all encountered Green. But it's also his first autobiographical writing, framed by his wife's wry observation that in the Anthropcene there are no detached observers, only participants. And each chapter ends with a score of 1 to 5, a wink to the internet culture which made Green famous but also to the ways our lives are enriched or impoverished by various things... though he makes clear the scores are just his scorings, which we can heed or ignore as we please. It's a charming and engaging book and the students who hadn't already encountered it loved it.
Reading it in the context of our course (I learned of it, of course, from some of the students) confirmed my sense that it's in a different space than the academic and journalistic things we've been reading. It's not really about how we got here, or how we should respond, or how little time we have, or whose responsibility all this is, and in this way it feels a little irresponsible. Green's introduction recounts how he only belatedly came to love the world, and in this book tries to share that love - but the world he serenades (in different keys, for things rated 1 or 2 rather than 4 or 5, of course) is the Anthropocene world, not the worlds it destroyed and keeps destroying. Is it wrong to try to find a way to feel at home on a damaged planet? My students, to my surprise, didn't think so - though I didn't pose the question this baldly.
