A cool read for the Anthropocene summer: John Green’s ‘The Anthropocene Reviewed’

John Green. Dutton, $28, 304pages, ISBN 978-0-525-55521-6

I just read The Anthropocene Reviewed by John Green, The New York Times bestselling author of young adult fiction who lives in Indianapolis with his family.  

You may have heard the term “Anthropocene” in the media a lot lately. You may have heard it in relation to human-caused climate change and the resulting catastrophic forest fires and hurricanes.

Green’s book is not the dense academic text you might assume it is by just hearing the title repeated, and you will soon discover that the book is very entertaining, and very funny. But it is also sobering. Green does, after all, acknowledge the fact that we humans have altered the earth’s biosphere so much that we require an entire geologic era be named after us.

“We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them,” he writes in the introduction.

The Anthropocene is the name geologists give to our current era, the era of man. Many earth scientists think we’re heading towards extinction as we eat through Planet Earth the way Cookie Monster eats through boxes of cookies. (There’s a heavy environmental cost to those cookies, by the way, among other mass-manufactured items.) 

But Green refuses to give into despair. In the chapter titled “Our Capacity for Wonder” he draws a lesson from his two-year-old son Henry looking at a leaf in the woods and cops his sense of wonder. 

Coming to terms with the fact that we live in the Anthropocene era is part and parcel of the approach taken by the IUPUI Arts & Humanities Institute (IAHI), where I was a research assistant for the past two years. 

The institute is involved in funding and furthering cross-collaborative work —  between different departments at IUPUI and between IUPUI and the Indianapolis community.

“The Anthropocene Household project ... looks at global environmental change at the level of the household,” says the IAHI’s executive director Jason Kelly. “Not only did we work together to shape the project, but we designed it with a number of our community partners. The project collects and tests water, dust, and soil for lead.”

Also part of this approach is the realization that none of us are completely powerless. We all have the power to make changes in our individual households to lessen our environmental impacts. 

At any rate, I can’t help thinking that the IAHI might make a great subject for Green to write about as well, an addendum to the subjects already covered in his book.

Green, who covers 44 subjects in 44 short chapters, got lots of practice writing short as a book reviewer for Booklist (175 words per review), where he worked from 2000-2005. Booklist didn’t use the five star rating system that he employs in The Anthropocene Reviewed. (The publication trusted their writers to get their point of view across with their words.) Rather than taking issue with his former employer’s method, Green is going for a certain humorous effect here. His slightly mischievous M.O. is to splash this rating scale on a broader canvas than we are used to. His chapter-long reviews range from the Indy 500 to The Nathan’s Famous Hotdog Eating Contest to viral meningitis to the city of Indianapolis. (Spoiler alert: Green gives Indy four stars.)

I also used a five star scale when I started out as a freelance art reviewer with NUVO in 2007, and it remained in place until I became NUVO’s arts editor in 2017 and flushed it for good. I found the star system reductive, facile, and occasionally harmful to artists’ reputations.

In 2012 I reviewed a group exhibition at the Indianapolis Museum of Art titled Graphite, curated by Sarah Urist Green, John’s wife. The exhibition, which ranks in my personal top ten in the best exhibitions ever seen department, featured artists who used graphite as a medium. It’s an art material enormously rich with possibility, from dead-on representation to electric conduction.  

Artist Robert Longo was one of those whose practice was fairly conventional but his conceptual material was anything but. The artist acknowledged his influences in his series of graphite-on-paper drawings of iconic artworks, putting Roy Lichetenstein’s pop imagery on one end of a timeline and the cave paintings of Lascaux, France on the other.   

The fifth chapter in The Anthropocene Reviewed is titled “The Lascaux Cave Paintings.” In the chapter, Green details how a group of teenagers found the cave paintings, located near Lascaux, France. The discovery of the 17,000 year-old paintings is arguably the greatest artistic discovery of all time. Their discovery attracted a huge amount of attention. But as Green relates in his prose, the cave paintings suffered from their popularity. They were damaged by artificial lighting and moisture from the breath and sweat of visitors.

Green sees it as a good sign for us as a species that  —   rather than keep the cave open until the paintings fade, peel off, or get subsumed by black mold —  the Lascaux cave grotto was closed to the public in 1963. Caves with replica paintings were opened elsewhere for visitors. But I’m not so sure that this is an unequivocal sign of hope. What if similar cave paintings were discovered in, say, Kilgore Texas, Louie Gohmert’s congressional district?  

I do take Green’s major point, wholeheartedly, though. It is important, especially as a parent, not to wallow in despair and seek reasons to hope. 

Green gave the same rating to the Lascaux cave paintings that I gave to the exhibit his wife curated: four and a half stars. I don’t have a rating for Green’s book, but I can definitely recommend it as a cool summer read.