Anthropocene Reviewed: The Instant Sunday Times Bestseller

Summary of Anthropocene Reviewed

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   A Five-Star Review of Everything: Finding Meaning in Our Human-Shaped World

   

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   What if you could rate your entire existence on a five-star scale? Not just restaurants or products, but sunsets, pandemics, and the feeling of grass beneath your feet? This unusual premise forms the heart of a collection that transforms mundane observations into profound meditations on what it means to be human in an age defined by human influence. Through forty-four essays rating everything from viral infections to classic songs, we're invited to examine our world with fresh eyes-not as detached observers, but as active participants in Earth's ongoing story. The approach feels simultaneously playful and deeply serious, acknowledging that our capacity for wonder might be our most essential survival trait. In an era of instant judgments and algorithmic recommendations, these essays slow us down, asking us to truly see what we've been scrolling past. We're living in the Anthropocene, an epoch where human activity has become the dominant influence on climate and environment, and these reflections force us to reckon with both the wonder and terror of that reality.

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   Songs, Art, and the Stories That Hold Us Together

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   "You'll Never Walk Alone" began in a 1945 musical about a troubled carousel barker, yet became an anthem for football fans, funeral attendees, and pandemic survivors. When Liverpool supporters sing at Anfield, they're participating in something ancient - the human need to face darkness together. What makes it endure isn't complexity but emotional truth: we're all walking through storms, and solidarity matters more than solutions. After my mental breakdown, packing my desk at Booklist magazine, I found a note from my boss: "Hope all goes well... Now more than ever: Watch Harvey." Back in Orlando with my parents, unable to read or write, we rented the 1950 film - Jimmy Stewart as Elwood P. Dowd, an alcoholic whose best friend is a six-foot invisible rabbit. His most profound line captivated me: "In this world, you must be oh so smart, or oh so pleasant. Well, for years I was smart. I recommend pleasant." I don't believe in epiphanies, but I've never felt quite as hopeless since. Palace Music's "New Partner" has been my favorite song for over twenty years, despite its baffling lyrics. It transports me through time - to twenty-one driving with my girlfriend, twenty-eight recovering from dental surgery, forty-one dancing with my wife. The song bridges past and present, letting me visit important memories without getting trapped in them. As poet Kaveh Akbar wrote, "Art is where what we survive survives."

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   Our Cosmic Blink: Humanity's Brief and Overwhelming Moment

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   Picture learning at age nine that the sun will eventually consume Earth. Not might-will. In a billion years, our oceans will evaporate, and the sun will swallow our planet entirely. Yet Earth will be fine without us. The planet has survived asteroid impacts that darkened the sky for years, volcanic eruptions that nearly sterilized all life, and mass extinctions that killed ninety-five percent of species. We've existed for roughly 250,000 years-younger than elephants, alpacas, and polar bears. If Earth's entire history were compressed into a calendar year, humans wouldn't appear until 11:48 PM on December 31st. We're extraordinarily young, yet we've reshaped the planet more dramatically than ancient species. What makes our potential extinction uniquely tragic isn't that Earth would miss us-it wouldn't-but that we're the only known beings capable of contemplating our own existence. We alone write poetry about sunsets, send spacecraft to distant planets, and wonder about our place in the cosmos. Our greatest strength lies in our unique ability to learn from the past and imagine different futures.

4. Chapter 4

   The Artificial Sweetness and Climate-Controlled Comfort of Modern Life

   Dr Pepper tastes like nothing in nature because it isn't. Created in 1885 by combining twenty-three syrups, this profoundly artificial beverage is pure chemistry. Diet Dr Pepper, reformulated with aspartame, tastes nearly identical despite zero calories-sugary-sweet pleasure without substance. It tastes more like the Anthropocene than any other soda: completely artificial, vaguely guilt-inducing, yet undeniably satisfying. This artificiality extends to where we live. Phoenix grew from 5,544 people in 1900 to 1.7 million today despite summer temperatures regularly exceeding 103F-enabled entirely by air conditioning. Invented in 1902, climate control now consumes ten percent of global electricity. Air conditioning represents a peculiar bargain: cooling indoors warms outdoors, creating a feedback loop where our comfort accelerates the climate change that makes cooling more necessary. We've built cities in deserts assuming artificial cooling-a perfect metaphor for how our solutions become our problems.

   Chapter 5

   Wild Things in Suburban Cages: Our Complicated Relationship with Nature

   The Canada goose nearly went extinct before 1935, when live decoys were banned. Now they dominate suburban landscapes, thriving on our lawns and parks. Like humans, geese mate for life and experience population explosions. Yet despite flourishing in our artificial environments, they show nothing but disdain-honking, strutting, and biting to keep us away. They've mastered exploiting our landscapes while maintaining their wildness. Bears reveal an even stranger transformation. Northern Europeans once feared speaking the animal's true name, using euphemisms like "the brown one." We hunted them to extinction in Britain and used them in bearbaiting spectacles, yet now our children cuddle stuffed versions. The teddy bear originated in 1902 when Theodore Roosevelt refused to shoot a semiconscious bear, inspiring manufacturers to create stuffed bears that evolved from realistic to increasingly cute-from Winnie-the-Pooh to Care Bears. This transformation reflects humanity's dominance: we now outweigh all wild mammals and birds combined by nearly four times. For many large animals, survival depends on utility or cuteness to humans. Yet despite teddy bears' popularity, actual bear populations keep declining. We've domesticated them in our imaginations while eliminating them from our landscapes. The geese thriving in our suburbs and the bears surviving only in our children's bedrooms tell the same story-we've created a world where wildness exists only on our terms.

   Chapter 6

   The Miracle and Terror of Consciousness: Bodies, Bacteria, and Pain

   A Staphylococcus aureus infection once hospitalized me for over a week-an illness that would have killed me before 1940. I'm among twenty percent of humans persistently colonized by this bacteria. Alexander Fleming discovered penicillin in 1928, but mass production began only after a productive strain was found on a Peoria cantaloupe. Bacteria evolved rapidly-by 1950, forty percent of staph was penicillin-resistant; today, only two percent respond to penicillin, and fifty thousand Americans die annually from staph infections. In 2014, viral meningitis struck when an enterovirus invaded my meninges. The headache was indescribable-not just pain but a consciousness-crushing omnipresence that rendered my self inert. As Elaine Scarry writes, "To have great pain is to have certainty. To hear that another person has pain is to have doubt." The pain felt eternal in the moment, yet I can hardly remember it now. The disease had no meaning-it was just suffering-yet we desperately seek patterns in our pain. This reminds us of our vulnerability: we're always just mutations away from losing advantages over microscopic adversaries, and our consciousness makes us uniquely aware of our fragility.

   Chapter 7

   Living in the Space Between Knowing and Not Knowing

   I pass two photographs daily: a photo booth strip of my wife and me from 2005, which shifts meaning as I age (from "This is us" to "We were just kids"), and August Sander's 1914 photograph "Young Farmers," later known as "Three Farmers on Their Way to a Dance." The photograph powerfully illustrates knowing and not knowing - the subjects could see the dance ahead but not World War I on their horizon. The three subjects weren't actually farmers but miners and an office worker. August was killed in March 1915 at age twenty-two. Otto was wounded three times but survived. Ewald lived into old age. As Alice Walker wrote, "All history is current" - a photograph that once seemed static becomes charged with new meaning as time passes. This relationship between past and present emerges in "Auld Lang Syne," the old song we use to welcome each new year. It captures genuine wistfulness - acknowledging human longing without romanticizing it, showing how each new year emerges from all previous ones. My children play the endless "Why?" game at breakfast, questioning everything until I'm forced to admit I believe "the human enterprise has value" despite not knowing exactly why. During depressive episodes, my brain plays a similar game called "What's Even the Point" - a state where everything feels meaningless, consumed by a "blinding, frozen white light" worse than darkness. To escape, I must choose to believe - a word that contains both "be" and "live." Walking with my children one day, I notice two squirrels racing up a magnificent sycamore tree. In that moment of connection beneath the sycamore's canopy, I find my answer. The Anthropocene is simultaneously wondrous and awful. I live in a wounded world where I am both the wound and the wounded. We are small and temporary beings, a species accustomed to taking more that must now learn to take less. Yet what an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet, to be Earth loving Earth. In the space between knowing and not knowing, between hope and despair, we find our humanity - not in grand gestures but in small moments of attention, in choosing to see beauty despite knowing how the story ends.

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