Rating “The Anthropocene Reviewed” by John Green

There is a lot to like in a new book by novelist and vlogger John Green. His newest work is not a novel, but a collection of nonfiction essays, some of which appeared in a podcast that has the same title as the book: “The Anthropocene Reviewed.” (The Anthropocene is an idea of a geological age named due to the way in which our species has reshaped the environment of our home planet.)

There are also some things to not like. I don’t always agree with him, and dislike a few of his reviews. He manages to extract meaning from an opening sequence of “Penguins of Madagascar,” which is cute of him to do, but I worry it might lead some innocent soul to experience that movie—and, please, don’t. It’s a horrible movie, more horrible because it successfully appeals to the lack of aesthetic sense of the young via flashy action, simple gags and silly characters. A bad movie made all the worse by being part of a trend of contemporary movies that make the meaningless artful as a way of thoughtlessly entertaining us, especially children. Do yourself a favor. Pick any Pixar movie for your kids instead.

In defense of John Green, I will agree that a point of his in this essay—that we, humans, make consequential decisions for other species—is important, and one of the many compelling factoids in this entertaining set of essays that comes from this review is that lemmings never commit suicide by casting themselves into the sea.

We choose to believe many things that just aren’t so.

As a journalism professor, I also think John is too hard on CNN—although I agree with his premise that a huge problem with news media is the lack of context in most news. I also concur that long-term, important trends are under-reported because they don’t cause unusual day-to-day events. My issue with his point is that I don’t think CNN is central to these trends—those tendencies existed before that cable TV network and are exacerbated today by social media. Lack of grounding in context has been a problem with American journalism since colonial times, although the problem is getting worse. CNN is not innocent in this, I just don’t it’s as guilty as Green implies.

In my kitchen, a monarch butterfly has emerged. My wife and I adopted a caterpillar in a program run by a local nature center, and we successfully raised this one to butterfly stage (not much to it, it was large when we got it and formed its chrysalis the next day). We are leaving on a trip and will have to have our daughter release it after its wings dry, so I have not seen the other side of its wings to confirm its biological sex. But I see no evidence of scent spots that males have. We named our caterpillar Anderson Pooper. After the CNN anchor. Turns out it may be Andrea.

Still, agreeing with his opinions or disagreeing with them is not really central to enjoying this book. In many ways, I like reading an essay that I don’t completely agree with—it causes lots of thoughts in me, which is pleasant to experience.

And good writing should encourage the reader to think—full credit for that, John Green.

A daughter got me this book for Fathers Day. It's cool that John Green signed thousands of sheets of paper so that each copy of the book has his actual signature in it. I don't think he doodled a cat, however--I think that image may be courtesy of a 5-year-old grandson who has a cat. Or his mother. Cool, either way--I am happy to have a book signed by John and decorated by family.

Beyond the nits I can pick, the book, overall, is excellent. Green has a pleasing, repetitive structure to many essays. He’ll open either with a personal anecdote or a seemingly unrelated tidbit, ruminate on it for a page, and then the main idea or thing that this essay reviews enters the stage, with Green sharing what he likes or does not like using the opening tidbit as narrative glue or for comparison. Each essay ends on the titular topic of the essay being rated on a 5-point scale.

He also writes about how artificial, how human, the 5-point rating scale is, which is part of the fun. He’s rating the works of humankind on a contrived, human scale. We live in a universe that our complex mammal brains give us the ability to reshape and tell stories about and make sense and nonsense of.

I’m listening to “The Mountain Goats” as I write this, a band I have never tuned into before. I don’t know that they’ll be a favorite of mine as they are of John’s—so much in musical taste depends on your age when you encounter that music—but I can hear his point. It’s good music.

It’s also media consumption that feels more useful than both CNN and “Penguins of Madagascar.”

To me, the book is all about the duality of humanity. We are a global species and we are doing a lot of damage to this Earth—and yet, we have the capacity for shared endeavor and understanding that maybe leaves some room for hope that we can learn to shape that impact in a less disastrous way.

One of my favorite essays is early in the book: “Humanity’s Temporal Range.” Temporal range refers to how long a species has been that species (or will be that species). We are, as humans, much younger than many types of life whose existence we have ended. The dodo was far more ancient than us. Elephants, whose long existence we now threaten, have been modern elephants for approximately 10 times longer than we have been modern humans—homo sapiens have had their hands on this planet for something on the order of 250,000 years, compared with the African elephant, lumbering along for more than 2 million years.

And one reason for us to think about the future of the elephant is that we are part of a complex web of life that we ignore at our peril.

As John puts it: “We probably didn’t know what we were doing thousands of years ago when 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 chose not to. As a result, for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.”

A profound point, even if the editor in me want to remind John that the name of our planet—Earth—is a proper noun. Maybe he means we are treading upon dirt—earth—but I think the sense of the noun in his sentence refers not to soil, but to our planetary home.

Consider another nit picked.

“The Anthropocene Reviewed” is a book of our time. It is written during the pandemic, which is one of the points. Such a pandemic has long been foreseen, and inevitably, like the next flood, will occur again because of human action and inaction.

So, it would be easy to despair at the state of humans. Indeed, in many personal essays, John Green deals with his own mental health struggles, living with the black force of meaninglessness.

However, he does not despair, and neither do I. His brother provides scant comfort for him in an essay about the pandemic by noting “the species will survive this.” Well, yes, but I would like to survive it, along with all who I love and even some who I don’t love, too. As Green notes, diseases that wipe out many humans are not unprecedented, they are very precedented, and what matters is our response.

Some of the essays concern nature, and how we are not separate from it, but part of it. “Sycamore Trees” are reviewed, and like Green, I am occasionally comforted by gardening and by nature. It’s good to gaze in awe at the trees.

As he puts it: “I’m just looking up at that tree, thinking about how it turned air and water and sunshine into wood and bark and leaves, and I realize that I am in the vast, dark shade of this immense tree. I feel the solace of that shade, the relief it provides. And that’s the point.”

It is.

Morning glory bud Monday in my backyard. It will be a pretty blue flower on Tuesday, gone on Wednesday. Life is temporary but beautiful. It's good to be in awe of it.

I don’t think it’s giving too much away, that it’s too much of a spoiler, to quote the end of this flawed but marvelous book, because it encapsulates John Green's message well, and also the words will resonate more when you experience the journey that brings to you to them. We are connected to each other as humans and to the planet that spawned us. We are not entities on Earth, but part of Earth that has become conscious of being part of Earth. We are Earth experiencing Earth.

“I won’t survive, of course. I will, sooner or later, be the everything that is part of everything else. But until then: What an astonishment to breath on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.”

With a capital E.

I give “The Anthropocene Reviewed” five stars.