I read Looking For Alaska in 2007, when I was 14 years old. I loved it, and I read the rest of John Green’s books when they came out, and I asked my dad to drive my brother and I to Ann Arbor so we could see Hank and John on tour in 2008. I’ve been watching their YouTube videos on and off for over a decade now. There’s always a piece of reading a John Green book that engages with the nostalgia of being 14 years old, and deciding that everyone should call me Samantha instead of Sam, because it sounds more adult.
The Anthropocene Reviewed is John Green’s take on our ubiquitous systems of reviewing everything on a five-point scale. In each review, he ties the subject of the review to a personal story – for example, in the review of Halley’s Comet.
“By the time Halley’s comet showed up in 1986, the scientific revolution’s approach to knowledge-building had proven so successful that even third graders like me knew about the layers of the earth. That day in the Ocala National Forest, my dad and I made a bench by nailing two-by-fours to sections of tree trunk. It wasn’t particularly challenging carpentry, but in my memory, at least, it took us most of the day. Then we started a fire, cooked some hot dogs, and waited for it to get properly dark – or as dark as Central Florida got in 1986.
“I don’t know how to explain to you how important that bench was to me, how much it mattered that my dad and I had made something together. But that night, we sat next to each other on our bench, which just barely fit the two of us, and we passed the binoculars back and forth, looking at Halley’s comet, a white smudge in the blue-black sky.”
The topics range from pop culture (scratch ‘n’ sniff stickers, Diet Dr. Pepper) to the common (sycamore trees) to the artistic (a 1914 photograph, Three Farmers on their Way to a Dance, Hiroyuki Doi’s Circle Drawings.)
The essays frequently take a rambling pathway of seemingly random facts about a topic, on the way to deeper meaning.
“Over the last hundred years, the weather for humans has gotten considerably hotter, not just because of global warming, but also because of where we are choosing to live. In the United States, for instance, the three states with the largest population gains in the past century – Nevada, Florida, and Arizona – are also among the warmest states. This trend is perhaps best exemplified by the U.S.’s fifth largest city, Phoenix, Arizona, which had a population of 5,544 people in 1900. In 2021, Phoenix was home to around 1.7 million people. The average high temperature in August is 103 degrees Fahrenheit, and that they have a professional ice hockey team, the Arizona Coyotes. Until 1996, the Coyotes were known as the Jets, and they were based in Winnipeg, Manitoba, where the weather is considerably cooler, but the NHL followed the money and the people toward the equator.”
The reviews often tie into reflections about humanity that strike the same tone – hopeful, against the odds.
“So now the people who found Lascaux are gone, and Lascaux itself is sealed off from view, visited only by the scientists working to preserve it. But tourists can still visit imitation caves, called Lascaux II, Lascaux III, and Lascaux IV, in which the artwork has been meticulously re-created.
“Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity, but I confess I find it overwhelmingly hopeful that four kids and a dog named Robot discovered a cave containing seventeen-thousand-year-old handprints, that the two teenagers who could stay devoted themselves to the cave’s protection, and that when humans became a danger to the cave’s beauty, we stopped going.“We might have graffitied over the paintings, or kept on visiting them until the black mold ate them away entirely. But we didn’t. We let them live on by sealing them off.
“The cave paintings at Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake cave we’ve built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the thing itself, but a shadow of it. This is a handprint, but not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the cave very much like the past it represents.”