The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet
Back in the fall of 2019, I was finishing a book that had taken multiple forms and shapes as I worked through different drafts. It was about place, home, dislocation, pollution, and ecological awareness. It ended up called Searching for the Anthropocene, because this concept (human impact on a geological level) seemed to capture what I was trying to grasp, or hinting at, or nudging toward—even if in truth it still felt very blurry to me, by the end. At one point I was at a backyard party in New Orleans and as I was describing my book to a friend, she said, “Oh, you know John Green’s ‘Anthropocene Reviewed’ podcast, right?” I did not know it, but made mental note to check it out. Then a pandemic spread around the planet, and I forgot about this brief mention. How many book recommendations were obliterated by Covid-19?
Flash forward to spring 2023, when Green’s book The Anthropocene Reviewed finally fell into my lap. It was assigned as a public library reading group title, and I was asked to pinch-hit for the normal discussion facilitator, who had to miss that day’s discussion. I was glad for the chance to sit with this book and read Green’s essays—or to borrow a word Ross Gay uses to describe his own work, they are essayettes, as Green’s chapters are really more impressionistic and flighty. And I do not mean that last word as a slight: I recognized this tic from my own grappling with the Anthropocene. The topic is so vast and, well, everywhere, that sometimes you just have to make brief forays into the muck and see if anything makes sense or connects.
This myopia—the impulse to elevate humankind above other life forms as well as non-life—is precisely emblematic (and perhaps symptomatic) of the Anthropocene. And yet it serves as an as-if settled matter, for Green.
Green’s book meanders across a field (or through a labyrinth) of mostly contemporary (and specifically Gen X-related) subjects, objects, and U.S. cultural themes, many of which are inflected by the then-emergent gloom of Covid-19. Sometimes I felt like I was right there with Green, like when he philosophically muses, “All life is dependent upon other life, and the closer we consider what constitutes living, the harder life becomes to define.” (200) Other times, though—and sometimes just pages away—I felt like Green was moving too fast or arriving at reckless conclusions. For instance, he writes that the human “capacity for listening, I think, really does separate human life from the quasi-life of an enterovirus.” (203) Both of these quotations are from a chapter on viruses, and Green is admirably grappling with the scalar complexities and overlaps of living entities, their most minuscule parts, entire species populations, and the individual lived experience of illness. But his inquiry breaks down at the conclusion, when Green seems to feel the need to reassert the specialness of human life. This myopia—the impulse to elevate humankind above other life forms as well as non-life—is precisely emblematic (and perhaps symptomatic) of the Anthropocene. And yet it serves as an as-if settled matter, for Green.
The book’s title conceit is simple. Each chapter ends with a review summary based on a five-star maximum. Green rates each topic in the final sentence of every chapter: Diet Dr Pepper gets four stars; sunsets get (rather predictably) five stars; Canada geese get only two stars (perplexingly, as they serve effectively for Green as indices of cross-species entanglements); plague gets one star; the “wintry mix” of Indianapolis in January gets four stars. This formula is both limited and not particularly compelling; readers do not wait on the edge of their seat to see what each final star-count will be. I can see how the star reviews helped Green write the book, but I am honestly surprised that the formula was not cut or perhaps expanded on (and complicated) during the editing process. As it stands, the “reviews” feel both arbitrary and frankly unhelpful. If it made for a clever podcast framework, the book version falls flat.
Still, I could appreciate Green’s attempt at wrapping words around this impossibly huge problem. The Anthropocene is simultaneously immensely impersonal, and inescapably each person’s to deal with and exacerbate. Green meets this paradox head-on and uses his own life as a sieve of sorts, catching little things—from favorite songs to passing moments to specific road trips—that cumulatively reflect, and allow Green to reflect on, the Anthropocene. I found myself doing this as I wrote about the Anthropocene, capturing nearby items and events as facets and fractals of something so much bigger than me, something I could not get away from.
I was very curious to see how Green’s writing would be taken up in a book group setting, across multiple generations of readers. Incidentally, my niece told me that the book was assigned in her high school’s English 3 class, though I cannot imagine 17-year-olds reading the book. On the other hand, my son, who was about to turn 13, read the chapter on Mario Kart, because he likes to play the game with his sister—and he “got” it. So maybe I was wrong about the Gen X slant of Green’s project.
The genius of The Anthropocene Reviewed is the personal musings and episodic rambling paired with accessible historical research and rich background material. Maybe this willingness to rove across heterogeneous material is exactly what readers need to feel inspired to do their own serious thinking about this overwhelming, tacky, all-consuming topic.
The book group comprised seven of us, including myself. I was the youngest, and I am by coincidence the same age as Green. The other participants ranged between 60 and 85. To start things off I asked everyone to summarize the book in one word, and after some haggling over hyphens and the option to use two words, here is what they said: they found the book “sweetly-prickly,” “interesting,” “thoughtful,” “emotional/vulnerable,” “personal,” and “narcissistic.” We then had a lively discussion about the scientific and academic meaning of Anthropocene, and how the act of reviewing works for Green in relation to this concept. Participants pointed out their favorite chapters; one noted that the book sometimes “tasted like Gen X.” We talked about the generationally specific parts of the book, but overall we seemed to conclude that there were enough general topics that the book’s audience was not as pigeonholed as I had worried it might be. We also discussed the book’s origin as a podcast, and how its sometimes chatty tone might be due to this translation across media forms.
Our hour flew by, and I ended up impressed by how Green’s book really did pull readers in across different life experiences and ages. The genius of The Anthropocene Reviewed is the personal musings and episodic rambling paired with accessible historical research and rich background material. Maybe this willingness to rove across heterogeneous material is exactly what readers need to feel inspired to do their own serious thinking about this overwhelming, tacky, all-consuming topic. In his guileless attempts to snatch and grab at the bits and detritus of the Anthropocene, John Green invites readers to do the same. And perhaps there is a collective wish image here, a belief that if enough of us paused, or paused more often, to do this, we might tap the brakes of this mad machine. To slow it down, maybe even stop it—or change directions, at least.
