The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

When the plague struck Europe in the 1300s, it was so infectious that no one would approach a dead or dying person for fear of becoming infected and then infecting others. Many people died in agonized isolation. During the 2020 pandemic of the much milder COVID virus, modern precautions also forced some ill people to die in isolation, with at best a Zoom call to say goodbye. As a chaplain, Green often held the hand of someone who was dying. He feels haunted by the idea that a loved one might die alone before he can get there and hold their hand.

Epidemics can bring out the best and the worst in people. During the plague, some priests risked their own lives to comfort the dying. Meanwhile, many people blamed Jews for the disease and murdered thousands: “It is human in a crisis not just to blame marginalized people, but to kill them” (212). Yet in Damascus, people of all faiths, rich and poor, gathered at mosques to petition God together for salvation.

The way out is through, together. The plague garners only one star, but our response to such crises can be courageous if we’re willing.

In Indianapolis and the Midwest, winter storms bring a “wintry mix” of rain, snow, sleet, and frozen rain, called graupel. During the much-postponed cleanup of his garden in January—a garden that, in spring and summer, a persistent groundhog raids—Green suffers under an assault of winter precipitation, and not the lovely snowflake kind. He feels like the sky is spitting on him.

He also knows that it’s a “pathetic fallacy” to attribute feelings to nature. Still, he likes it when writers and poets give clouds personal traits like loneliness or geniality or being threatening; it changes a person’s perspective. The evening after a garden clean-up, Green and his wife drove through the wintry mix to attend a poetry reading, and in her soothing company the graupel suddenly seemed beautiful. Thus, Green gives four stars to the wintry mix.

During a 2008 trip to northern Europe—during which he got comically drunk and fell into a Swedish lake—Green and his wife and another couple visited Iceland and arrived in the capital, Reykjavik, just as the country won its first Olympic medal. People poured into the streets, yelling and crying and singing, and Green and his group, trapped in the throng, began to sing along and accept beers. By the day’s end, Green was a thoroughgoing fan of Icelandic men’s handball.

That evening, they visited the Baejarins Beztu Pylsur hot dog stand, well-known and highly rated by travelers. Though not a connoisseur of hot dogs, Green found them “among the most joyous culinary experiences of my life” and a “once-in-a-lifetime” experience (228-29). Baejarins frankfurters get five stars.

Green doesn’t write in journals; instead, he makes notes in the margins of books he’s reading. Years later, some of those notes make no sense: He’s forgotten the context. Most, however, like “FERAL HOG HUNT” (232), which became a scene in one of his novels, he still understands.

He bought his first iPhone in 2008, and the habit of bringing a book and pen began to lapse; instead, he jotted down random thoughts in the phone’s Notes app. After several years, he switched to another note-taking app, and, like traveling book and pen, the Notes app is now part of his past. In its honor, he pores through the old notes and selects, in reverse order, one from each year during his use of Notes. Here are a few:

“2016: ‘No bright line between imagination and memory’” (234). This became the theme of his book Turtles All the Way Down.

“2015: ‘This bar has lights everywhere but you can’t see anybody’s face’” (234). A comment he overheard, it reminded him of his ongoing struggle to respond in a timely manner, despite his anxieties, when in conversation.

“2011: ‘It was kind of a beautiful day—only saveable sentence’” (235). The single phrase saved from a failed novel, “It was kind of a beautiful day” made it into another of Green’s books, The Fault in Our Stars.

The Notes app gets three and a half stars.

Green’s favorite band is The Mountain Goats. The band’s album Tallahassee, about a dysfunctional romantic couple, deeply affected Green during his own failing relationship, and he memorized all the lyrics. He considers some of the song’s words “almost scriptural to me, in the sense that they give me a guide to the life I want to live and the person I wish to be when I grow up” (238). He gives the band five stars.

The term “QWERTY” refers to nearly all keyboards for writing in English because those are the first letters on the upper-left row of keys. The QWERTY system isn’t very efficient—many of the letters we use most commonly aren’t located on the home keys, where typists’ fingers rest naturally—but it became the norm after much testing and a bit of chance. Wisconsin publisher and politician Christopher Latham Sholes led a group that developed a good typewriter, and the Remington and Sons gun company bought up the rights and transformed Sholes’s QWERTY keyboard into the QWERTY one that we know today. It proved popular, and soon this keyboard was the accepted standard. Others have tried to replace QWERTY with more efficient keyboards, especially the Dvorak system, but none have won the hearts and minds of typists. Even Sholes patented a different, more efficient layout.

Green has poor handwriting but since childhood has been a fast typist: “The keyboard is my path to having thoughts, and also my path to sharing them” (243). Typing makes his words appear normal to others, which allows him to share his thoughts more easily. Despite its imperfections, the QWERTY keyboard garners four stars.

The US is home to many oddities, including many of the world’s largest balls, consisting of materials like popcorn, stickers, rubber bands, stamps, and twine. In addition to the largest balls of such materials, the US boasts other marvels such as a replica of Stonehenge made of junked cars and a building with a facade made of corn kernels. Our Interstate Highway system enables fast travel over long distances, so roadside attractions sprang up to lure people during their trips. The charm of such attractions often comes from their utter pointlessness. As a fan of such “beautiful foolishness,” Green visited the world’s largest ball of paint in Alexandria, Virginia. This paint ball, which Mike Carmichael and his three-year-old son created in 1977, has grown continuously over the decades since then as the Carmichaels and visitors added layers. The ball now has some 26,000 layers of paint, weighs two and a half tons, and has its own building.

No genius changes the world alone. Caesar, da Vinci, Michelangelo, and Newton needed teams of people to help them complete their world-changing projects. Likewise, in the manner of those few strokes of paint that someone adds to that giant ball, our lives contribute small layers to the larger human enterprise. Our efforts, though soon painted over, are still there, underneath, helping to build the entire thing. For this, the world’s largest ball of paint gets four stars.

Green’s kids used to play a game with him that he calls “Why?” in which for everything he tells them to do—for instance, to finish their breakfast—they answer with “Why?” and he produces an explanation, to which they respond with “Why?”—and this continues in a circular fashion. When he gets depressed, Green lately plays a darker version with himself that he calls “What’s Even the Point?” (252), which challenges the purpose of everything he does.

While Green and his son were walking one day, they came upon a beautiful old sycamore tree, and they stood “in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides” (255). Later he learned that a 300-year-old sycamore had a 40-foot circumference and that two people once lived inside a sycamore tree trunk. Such trees somehow transcend all Green’s doubts, and for this, he gives them five stars.

The song “New Partner,” by Will Oldham, is Green’s favorite non-Mountain Goats song. It’s about falling in love and heartbreak, and it has the magical property, whenever Green hears it, of reminding him who he was the other times he heard it. He heard it when he was 21, in love, traveling with a girlfriend to visit a distant relative. He heard it again when he was 22, a student chaplain, single and miserable. At age 28, he heard the song when living in a Chicago basement with his bride, and he remembers vividly the smell of the mouthwash he used to cleanse a painful injury to his mouth.

At age 32, when he was a new father who felt incompetent as his baby wailed for no reason, he listened again to “New Partner.” At 41, he and his wife listen to the song, recall the mutual feeling of new love, and notice the similarity to their feelings now. They slow-dance together a bit while their nine-year-old son makes gagging noises, though the kid admits that he kind of likes the song. “New Partner” gets five stars.

In 1914, August Sander photographed three young German farmers, dressed formally, each wearing a hat and holding a cane, looking back over their shoulders at the camera as they headed to a social event. Too soon, they were caught up in World War I: “[I]t’s a picture about knowing and not knowing. You know you’re on your way to a dance, but don’t know you’re on your way to a war” (264-65).

Every picture captures a moment whose meaning changes as time passes. The three-farmers photo is a reminder that the future is always a surprise. Of the three young men—they were, in fact, iron miners—one died early in the war and the other two sustained wounds. The Nazis later destroyed much of the photographer’s work for its respectful treatment of Jewish and Roma minorities.

Similarly, Green has a photo from January 2020 of himself and family friends, arms linked, their kids splayed on the floor beneath. Already the COVID pandemic has altered the meaning of that image; time will change it further. Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance merits four and a half stars.

The German edition of The Anthropocene Reviewed has a different title. In English, it means, “How Have You Enjoyed the Anthropocene So Far?” (271) Thus far, Green has found life both “wondrous!” and “awful!” With dear friends he has enjoyed many activities, some of them ridiculous or silly, and meanwhile he has fretted over humans’ capacity to destroy the Earth’s species and possibly ourselves. Still, he finds it an “astonishment” and a “blessing” to be alive on Earth.