Anthropocene Reviewed

Mary Chapin Carpenter - Why Walk When You Can Fly?

 

All these palm trees burned in 2022 (see the charred trunks) and are now back.

Here are my Kindle notes from John Green's The Anthropocene Reviewed (based on his podcast of the same name) simply listed in order:

consciousness is temporary and precarious.

when people write reviews, they are really writing a kind of memoir

To fall in love with the world isn’t to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and the distance of the stars.

Humans are a threat to our own species and to many others, but the planet will survive us. In fact, it may only take life on Earth a few million years to recover from us.

Two hundred and fifty million years ago, during the Permian extinction, ocean surface waters likely reached 104 degrees Fahrenheit, or 40 degrees Celsius. Ninety-five percent of Earth’s species went extinct, and for five million years afterward, Earth was a “dead zone” with little expansion of life.

Halley’s comet will be more than five times closer to Earth in 2061 than it was in 1986.

I am extremely happy that my children are no longer three,

As many as a quarter of women died in childbirth, and around 50 percent of children did not live to the age of five.

You often hear people say, “There are so many chemicals in it.” Of course, there are also lots of chemicals in wine, or coffee, or air.

“It is fortunate,” Charles Dudley Warner wrote more than a century ago, “that each generation does not comprehend its own ignorance. We are thus enabled to call our ancestors barbarous.”

Scientists sought out more productive strains of the mold, and eventually the bacteriologist Mary Hunt found one on a cantaloupe in a Peoria, Illinois, grocery store. That strain became even more productive after being exposed to X-rays and ultraviolet radiation. Essentially all penicillin in the world descends from the mold on that one cantaloupe in Peoria.

We imagine other animals as being without consciousness, mindlessly following the leader to they-know-not-where, but in that construction, we sometimes forget that we are also animals.

‘In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant.’ Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant.”

I hope you never find yourself on the floor of your kitchen.*

Kurt Vonnegut wrote that one of the flaws in the human character “is that everybody wants to build and nobody wants to do maintenance.”

For every grain of sand on Earth, there are trillions of viruses.

Philipp Dettmer’s book Immune, there are so many viruses on Earth that “if they were laid end to end, they would stretch for 100 million light years—around 500 Milky Way galaxies put next to each other.”

We often hear that we live in unprecedented times. But what worries me is that these times feel quite precedented. For humans, being in uncharted territory is often good news, because our charted territory is so riddled with disease, injustice, and violence.

I am highly suspicious of attempts to brightside human suffering

I don’t believe we have a choice when it comes to whether we endow the world with meaning.

“No bright line between imagination and memory.”

One day I was at church, and the gospel reading included Matthew 19:24, which goes, “Again, I tell you, it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the Kingdom of God.” The minister said that people take every line of the Bible literally except for that one, when it is the only line that is meant literally.

Densmore was a passionate vegetarian who survived primarily on raw apples and was known for getting into arguments at restaurants whenever he overheard a stranger ordering a meat dish.

Now always feels infinite and never is. I was wrong about life’s meaninglessness when I was a teenager, and I’m wrong about it now.

“We do not see things as they are, we see them as we are.”

“You’re going to be okay, you know. Not in the short run . . .” and then she paused before saying, “And also not in the long run, I guess. But in the medium run.”

* I hope that for you, too.   😢