The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

“Auld Lang Syne,” the title of a song with which we toast the year gone by, is a Scottish expression that means “for old times’ sake” (145). The song lyrics go back 400 years, but the current version, first presented by Scottish poet Robert Burns, dates to 1788, and the tune we use became the norm in 1799. Beethoven wrote an arrangement for it; the music has appeared in several films, and it’s served other purposes in Japan, the Netherlands, and Korea.

The contrast between our infinite yearnings and the finite lives we’re given fascinated Green’s friend and collaborator Amy Krouse Rosenthal. When she learned that she had cancer, she called Green and asked for his advice. He said that he believes love survives death but otherwise was tongue-tied with sadness. She’s gone now, but he fondly remembers their years of friendship and hopes that she forgives him for his inadequate response.

On Christmas Eve in 1914 during World War I, troops from both sides met between the front lines and sang songs together, including “Auld Lang Syne.” The horror of that war soon exhausted the goodwill, however: British troops changed the words of “Auld Lang Syne” to “We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because we’re here” (151), a response to the mindless killing. Rosenthal sometimes resurrected that nihilistic version and sang it with her audiences. Its words suggest that despite the meaninglessness of much of life, at least we are here, which is itself noble. Green concludes that “Auld Lang Syne” deserves five stars.

Despite the things that Green admits he does poorly, he’s great at googling strangers. For his work and private life, he looks up information about people nearly every day: “I just have a knack for it” (153). The modern world of computing creates many benefits, but the ease with which we can find out about each other via the internet is unnerving. For example, learning where someone went to elementary school, a common security question during account signups, is simple. Green has shared so much of his personal information in public that he has trouble finding a security question that others can’t figure out.

During his time as an emergency-room chaplain, Green saw a lot of trauma and death, but the worst was a three-year-old child who suffered in screaming agony with third-degree burns over his body. He did his best to soothe the parents’ distress, and the doctors did what they could. He has prayed for that boy every day since. It’s part of why he decided not to go to divinity school. Fifteen years later, he googled the child and found him on Facebook, an 18-year-old member of Future Farmers of America who loves corny Country music and calls his girlfriend “bae.” Green felt tremendous relief to know that the kid was “Alive. Alive. Alive” (157). Googling strangers gets four stars.

Green and his wife moved from New York City to Indianapolis when she landed a job at the Indianapolis Museum of Art. At the U-Haul return desk, they asked the clerk what he thought of the city, and he replied, “Well, you gotta live somewhere” (160).

With its sprawl, inadequate funding for the arts and transportation, polluted White River, and endless parking lots and malls, Indianapolis is so typically American that it’s a test bed for new restaurant chains. The name of a major thoroughfare is “Ditch.” The place soon disgusted Green, who also grew to hate all the maintenance that their starter home there required. Even author Kurt Vonnegut, who loved living there as a nine-year-old, moved away.

Green’s neighborhood, though, is one of the most ethnically diverse in the US, and, for all its mediocrity, “the people of Indianapolis have gone and made something beautiful anyway” (162). Green thus learned to love the city and its people. Despite its faults, Indianapolis is real and worthwhile, and it gets four stars.

The biggest crop in the US is lawn grass, most of it Kentucky Bluegrass, which isn’t from Kentucky and isn’t blue. It costs billions of dollars and tons of resources to maintain but does little except look pretty. Green imagines space aliens visiting the US and asking why its people worship lawn grass. American lawns take up an area larger than Italy.

At first, lawns were where livestock grazed. In England during the 1700s, they became status symbols for people who could afford to have one at their palatial estates. Today, many consider well-manicured lawns a sign of a good-quality neighborhood. Kids play on lawns; otherwise, they’re expensive decorations. Kentucky Bluegrass gets two stars.

The Indianapolis 500 is a car race held each May in Speedway, Indiana, a town surrounded by Indianapolis and just five miles from Green’s home. Some 300,000 spectators watch the race, which makes it the world’s largest non-religious gathering. Nowhere in the spectator areas can anyone view the entire event at once. The cars travel at over 200 miles per hour, mere inches from one another. Despite the precisely engineered vehicles and the drivers’ supreme abilities, 42 have died there.

The danger is part of the thrill, and the competition has brought more speed and efficiency to transportation. In addition, it’s advanced our understanding of the relationships between humans and their machines. On the other hand, it’s part of the larger mania for winning that sometimes has bad side effects.

Each year, Green joins 100 others for an early-morning bicycle ride to the racetrack and the Indy 500. As they approach, congestion and noise get worse, but “I like this crowd, because I’m in an us that doesn’t require a them” (172). The participants chain their bikes to a fence, head off to their seats in the stands, and rejoin hours later for the return ride home. The race and the camaraderie surrounding it are part of an ongoing and comforting tradition that inspires Green. He gives the Indy 500 four stars.

In the game Monopoly, “a celebration of getting rich by making others poor” (179), players try to acquire so much wealth that other players go broke. The game’s 1933 inventor, Charles Darrow, is famous as a rags-to-riches success. Monopoly, though, comes from an earlier game by Elizabeth Magie, who in 1906 invented the similar Landlord’s Game. That game had an optional set of rules whereby the players, instead of trying to bankrupt each other, work together to create community wealth. The game board later settled into its Atlantic City locale; Darrow copied it, patented it, and got rich. His story resembles the game itself in that he took resources from others, made them his own, and cut the early developers out of the loop.

To this day, game maker Hasbro acknowledges Magie as “one of the pioneers of land-grabbing games” (179) rather than as an early feminist who wanted the game to show the pitfalls of unbridled capitalism. Monopoly rates one and a half stars.

Super Mario Kart, which Nintendo launched in 1992, is a racing game in which players choose a character from the Super Mario universe to drive their kart. Each character has strengths and weaknesses, and players use them accordingly. The raceways range from simple roads to castles and ships. Karts drive over boxes that confer temporary abilities, or power-ups, to slow or damage opponents’ karts: The further back players are, the better the abilities they’re likely to get.

Green played it regularly in high school. It was a great way for friends to be together and gossip, and it was his first group-friendship experience. Today’s version is much more elaborate, but strategy—drive fast, corner well—is the same. In 2018, Green played Mario Kart 8 with his son and was comfortably ahead when his son got a power-up, which turned his kart into a bullet that destroyed Green’s vehicle and raced ahead to win.

In this way, the game favors slow players but is less fair to better ones. Life, on the other hand, tends to be the opposite: People who graduate from college, write a best-seller, or simply are white or male, tend to receive power-ups in the form of perks and more attention. Partly for its fairness, Super Mario Kart gets four stars.

Green’s favorite person, by far, is his wife Sarah, an art curator and PBS program producer. One of his favorite experiences is “the feeling of Sarah’s gaze and mine meeting and entwining as we looked at a third thing” (186). That third thing can be art, or a shared book, or their two children, or anything that engages them as a couple.

In 2018, they traveled to Wendover, Utah, to do some work on Sarah’s PBS show, The Art Assignment. While there, they stayed just across the border at a casino in Nevada. Green considers casinos gross but finds gambling in the company of others a guilty pleasure that’s hard to resist.

The nearby Bonneville Salt Flats are a vast salt plain that in prehistoric times was the floor of the huge Lake Bonneville, whose remnant is the Great Salt Lake. The white salt crunching beneath Green’s feet gave him an eerie feeling, “like everything you’re scared to say out loud” (188). The salty, pristinely white surface attracts filmmakers, along with drivers who break land-speed records on its perfect flatness.

Green wandered off onto the flats until he felt the loneliness of the place. He remembered how in his childhood he found the arbitrary power of the adults around him terrifying. His wife called him over, and at once he felt calmer. He gives the salt flats three and a half stars.

Green loves repetitive activity—he finds it soothing—and already has pre-signed his novels 500,000 times. Now and then, during downtime, he asks his publisher to send him thousands of sheets of paper just so he can sign them.

Similarly, Chef Hiroyuki Doi, after his brother died from cancer, worked through his grief by drawing tiny circles on paper, over and over, until they formed works of art. Some look like galaxies; others, like mast cells. Doi’s drawings remind us that it’s okay not to rush around madly searching for our yearnings and instead just be in the moment, even if it’s merely to do something repetitive. Green gives those drawings four stars.

Punctuality is important to Green, who fears the consequences of tardiness and worries a lot about making sure that he’s not late. One day, he tried to hurry his daughter, Alice, through breakfast and on to daycare, and she suddenly leaned over and whispered something to him. It was a minor secret, but her purpose was to get her father to stop being in a hurry.

People whisper all the time, telling secrets or rumors, but the pandemic curtailed that activity, and he misses it. His kids sometimes whisper their fears to him, and he does what he can to assuage them, but some worries are universal and have no real solution, so his approach is instead to simply “shut up and listen. Otherwise, you miss all the good stuff” (197). Whispering rates four stars.