The Anthropocene Reviewed(72)

My parents, Mike and Sydney Green, enriched this book in many ways, as did my in-laws, Connie and Marshall Urist. I’m also so grateful to Chris and Marina Waters. Sarah Urist Green is the best collaborator in work and in life I could ever imagine.

So much of this book was made possible by the people who listen to The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast. Thank you for the topics you suggested and the poems you emailed. I’m especially grateful to the online community Tuataria, who researched the story of the young farmers that closes this book, and to the Life’s Library Book Club and all those who work to make it amazing.

Lastly, to Henry and Alice: Thank you. You both astound me with joy and wonder. Thank you for helping me with this book and teaching me about everything from velociraptors to whispering.





NOTES


Many of these essays first appeared, in different forms, on the podcast The Anthropocene Reviewed, a co-production of WNYC Studios and Complexly. Portions of other essays first appeared in the PBS Digital series The Art Assignment, founded and produced by Sarah Urist Green, or on the YouTube channel vlogbrothers. The notes below are not intended to be exhaustive (or exhausting), but instead as an introduction for those interested in further reading and other experiences that informed the essays.

This is a work of nonfiction, but I’m sure that I have misremembered much. I have also in moments changed details or characterizations in order to preserve people’s anonymity.

These notes and sources were compiled with the help of Niki Hua and Rosianna Halse Rojas, without whom this book would have been impossible. Any mistakes are mine alone.





“You’ll Never Walk Alone”


One of the many benefits of loving Liverpool Football Club is that over time, knowledge about the song “You’ll Never Walk Alone” seeps into you via osmosis. The quote about Molnár not wanting Liliom to become a Puccini opera comes from Frederick Nolan’s The Sound of Their Music, as did much of the other information about the musical and Molnár’s relationship with it. I learned about the musical changes Gerry and the Pacemakers made to the song from Niki Hua. Gerry Marsden, who died in early 2021, often told the story about meeting Shankly, including in an Independent interview with Simon Hart from 2013. No human life is complete without joining with sixty thousand people singing “You’ll Never Walk Alone” together, and I hope that is an experience available to you at some point, and also that it is available to me again soon.





Humanity’s Temporal Range


The idea for this essay came from a conversation with my friend and longtime collaborator Stan Muller. There are many versions of the Earth-history-in-a-year analogy, but I relied mostly on a timeline developed by the Kentucky Geological Survey. The poll about people in different countries having different beliefs about our proximity to the Apocalypse was conducted by Ipsos Global Affairs. Most of the information about the Permian extinction came from a 2012 National Geographic story by Christine Dell’Amore called “‘Lethally Hot’ Earth Was Devoid of Life—Could It Happen Again?” (Spoiler alert: It could. Actually, it will.) The Octavia Butler quotes are from Parable of the Talents. The idea of seeing things you’ll never see came to me from the work of the artist David Brooks, via his art assignment challenge printed in Sarah Urist Green’s book You Are an Artist. The information on global average temperature rise since the Industrial Revolution came from the National Climatic Data Center of the NOAA.





Halley’s Comet


As noted in the review, much of the background for understanding Edmond Halley and his comety calculations came from two very enjoyable books: Julie Wakefield’s Halley’s Quest, about Halley’s time as a ship captain and explorer, and John Gribbin and Mary Gribbin’s Out of the Shadow of a Giant: Hooke, Halley, and the Birth of Science. I learned of Fred Whipple’s “dirty snowball” theory of comets from the Smithsonian Astrophysical Observatory. More information on responses to the 1910 apparition of the comet can be found in Chris Riddell’s 2012 Guardian article “Apocalypse Postponed?” (It’s only ever postponed, that Apocalypse.)





Our Capacity for Wonder


I’m indebted to Matthew J. Bruccoli’s book about F. Scott Fitzgerald, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur, and also to Nancy Mitford’s Zelda, about Zelda Fitzgerald. I learned a lot about Armed Services Editions from a 2015 article in Mental Floss magazine called “How WWII Saved The Great Gatsby from Obscurity.” I was able to stay in the Plaza Hotel due to the largesse of Fox 2000, a filmmaking enterprise that no longer exists. “The Crack-Up” was initially published in Esquire magazine in 1936 and is now available online. Various manuscripts for The Great Gatsby are available online through Princeton University’s library, and it’s fascinating to see what changed (and what didn’t) among the revisions. The David Denby quote comes from a review published in the New Yorker on May 13, 2013.





Lascaux Cave Paintings


I first learned of these paintings and the story of our separation from them in Werner Herzog’s documentary Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I learned more from Judith Thurman’s essay “First Impressions,” in the June 16, 2008, issue of the New Yorker. Simon Coencas recorded an oral history for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, which is available online at its website. Coencas’s quote about the “little gang” came from a 2016 interview with the AFP. The Barbara Ehrenreich essay “The Humanoid Stain” was first published in The Baffler in November 2019. The Lascaux website, at archeologie.culture.fr, was especially helpful, and included references to hand stencils at Lascaux. I learned of Genevieve von Petzinger’s work from a 2016 New Scientist article by Alison George called “Code Hidden in Stone Age Art May Be the Root of Human Writing.”Last, I would not have been able to write this review without Thierry Félix’s work to preserve both the cave and the stories of those who discovered it.