The Anthropocene Reviewed(73)
Scratch ’n’ Sniff Stickers
The Helen Keller quote about smell is from her wonderful book The World I Live In. The Baltimore Gas and Electric debacle is described in an AP News story from September 4, 1987.
When I was in middle school, one of my teachers took me aside after class one day. She knew that I had been struggling academically as well as socially, and she went out of her way to tell me that she liked something I’d written. She also said to me, “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.” This moment of kindness stayed with me, and helped hold me together in tough days, and I don’t know if this book would exist without it. I have forgotten this teacher’s name, as I have forgotten almost everything, but I am so grateful to her.
Diet Dr Pepper
The history of Dr Pepper is told succinctly (if somewhat self-aggrandizingly) at the Dr Pepper Museum and Free Enterprise Institute in Waco, Texas. (Foots Clements, a staunch anti-communist, insisted that the museum be a celebration of not only Dr Pepper but also free markets.) Charles Alderton was a member of the Masons, and so far as I know, the fullest biography written of him was put together by the Waco Masonic Lodge, and is available at its website. I am also indebted to two histories of Dr Pepper: The Legend of Dr Pepper/7-Up by Jeffrey L. Rodengen, and The Road to Dr Pepper, Texas by Karen Wright, which explores the astonishing story of the Dublin Dr Pepper bottling plant, which produced a unique cane-sugar version of Dr Pepper until 2012.
Velociraptors
When writing Jurassic Park, Michael Crichton consulted with the paleontologist John Ostrom, whose research helped revolutionize our understanding of dinosaurs. In a New York Times interview with Fred Musante on June 29, 1997, Ostrom discussed his relationship with Crichton and how Crichton chose the name velociraptor because it was “more dramatic.” As explained in a Yale News article from 2015, the team behind the Jurassic Park film asked for all of Ostrom’s research on deinonychus when deciding how to portray the film’s velociraptors. I learned much of the truth about velociraptors from my son, Henry, and then from the American Museum of Natural History, where I also read of the velociraptor that died in the midst of fighting a protoceratops. My favorite reading on the resurrection of the brontosaurus is Charles Choi’s “The Brontosaurus Is Back,” published by Scientific American on April 7, 2015.
Canada Geese
For a bird I actively dislike, the Canada goose is a joy to read about. Much of the information from this essay came from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology (allaboutbirds.org), which is so wondrously comprehensive and accessible that the rest of the internet should take a lesson from it. Harold C. Hanson’s book The Giant Canada Goose is one of those highly specialized books that is nonetheless thoroughly fun. Joe Van Wormer’s 1968 book The World of the Canada Goose is lovely, too. The Philip Habermann quote came from the book History Afield by Robert C. Willging. If you want to learn more about the history of lawns, I recommend Krystal D’Costa’s Scientific American piece, “The American Obsession with Lawns.”
Teddy Bears
I first heard the story of Teddy Roosevelt sparing the bear that died anyway from a TED Talk given by Jon Mooallem, whose book Wild Ones: A Sometimes Dismaying, Weirdly Reassuring Story About Looking at People Looking at Animals in America is as enjoyable as you’d expect from that subtitle. The taboo avoidance etymology of the word bear is described in the incredibly helpful online etymology dictionary (etymonline.com). The Smithsonian’s history of the teddy bear was also very helpful to me; this is how I learned of the 1902 Washington Post article about Roosevelt sparing (sorta?) the bear. The figures of Earth’s biomass distribution come from “The Biomass Distribution on Earth,” lead author Yinon M. Bar-On, first published on May 21, 2018, in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America. I was introduced to the concept of species biomass in Yuval Noah Harari’s book Sapiens. The Sarah Dessen quote is from her wonderful novel What Happened to Goodbye.
The Hall of Presidents
Special thanks to my children, Henry and Alice, for taking half an hour away from their Disney vacation so that I could visit the Hall of Presidents for this review. When I asked my son afterward if he enjoyed the presentation, he paused for a moment before saying, “I want to say yes but I didn’t.”
Air-Conditioning
The idea for this essay came from my friend Ryan Sandahl, who told me the story of Willis Carrier. I also relied on Margaret Ingels’s book Willis Haviland Carrier: Father of Air Conditioning. The information about the role air-conditioning and cooling fans play in climate change came from the International Energy Agency’s 2018 report, “The Future of Cooling.” Data about the 2003 heat wave catastrophe came from a report first published in France in 2008 in Comptes Rendus Biologies. John Huxham’s account of the 1757 European heat wave was first published in Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society; I learned about it via Wikipedia. For understanding the ways air-conditioning has changed architecture, I am indebted to an episode of the podcast 99% Invisible.