The
Anthropocene
Reviewed
Essays on a Planet Made by Humans
"The Anthropocene is defined by the notion that we have irrevocably altered the planet. But it's also defined by what we're still choosing to create and preserve."
The Thesis
Reviewing the Human World
We live in the Anthropocene—a geological epoch defined by human influence on Earth. But what does that mean? John Green doesn't offer grand pronouncements. Instead, he reviews specific things we've made: pizza, the internet, John Philip Sousa. Some get four stars. Others get one.
Through these intimate reviews, Green explores what it means to be human on a planet we've utterly transformed. How do we find meaning and joy? How do we honor what's been lost? How do we love a world we've damaged?
We rate things not to solve the world, but to say: "This matters to me. This moved me. This is part of my story."
Rating forces us to pay attention. When we slow down and really feel something, we notice its value and its cost.
Rating what we love and what we've lost is a quiet act of resistance against numbness and despair.
Try This
Rate a Human Creation
Below are five creations from the book. Rate each one on a scale of 1–5 stars. What's your assessment of human effort?
Pizza
Born from flatbread + sauce + cheese, pizza is a perfect food. Nourishing, democratic, accessible. It feeds humans from Naples to New York.
The Internet
Humanity's greatest tool for connection. But also for distraction, cruelty, and isolation. It contains everything we're capable of.
Coffee
A minor miracle. Hot, bitter, stimulating. Coffee has fueled revolutions, powered artists, and connected strangers in a thousand coffeehouses.
Music
Sound organized by human hands and hearts. Music is how we survive grief, celebrate joy, and remember what it means to be alive together.
Sunsets
We inherited sunsets, but we've changed the light that creates them. Now they're more vivid—a gift and a reminder of what we've done to the air.
Community
Key Insights
What readers found most meaningful in The Anthropocene Reviewed.
"The Anthropocene — the age of humans — is defined not by how long we've existed but by how profoundly we've changed everything."
Green's essays are reviews in the academic sense — critical, considered, personal — and in the consumer sense: starred, ranked, honest. They refuse to separate the intellectual from the human.
"We are small and temporary and this is not a contradiction with meaning — it's the precondition of it."
Green's persistent theme: finitude is not a bug but a feature. The awareness of death — and of geological deep time — doesn't diminish meaning. It concentrates it.
"Almost everything worth doing is impossible to do perfectly. The habit of waiting for perfect conditions is the habit of not doing."
Green's essay on the Challenger spacecraft: the engineers who said 'no' and the engineers who said 'yes' were equally uncertain. The decision to act is always made in uncertainty.
"There is no such thing as being good at being human without practice at being human."
Green's essays on failure, love, medicine, and fame all converge: the capacity to navigate a human life is developed, not innate. It's a craft.
"Community is not built on shared values. It's built on the willingness to show up when showing up is hard."
Green's account of his son's hospitalization and his own depression: the communities that sustained him weren't built on ideology. They were built on presence.
"We don't read to find ourselves. We read to find other people who've found themselves — and see if we recognize their experience."
Green's most nuanced essay on reading: literature doesn't give you yourself back. It gives you access to other minds — and through them, a wider range of what being human can look like.
Apply It
Action Steps
How to practice the art of thoughtful review and find meaning in a human-made world.
Write Your Own Anthropocene Review
Pick something ordinary — coffee, airports, a specific song. Write a two-paragraph review of it. The practice of close attention to ordinary things is Green's core method.
Sit With the Knowledge of Your Smallness
Take 10 minutes to really contemplate your relative scale in geological time. Don't spiritualize it or dismiss it. Feel it. Notice what comes up. That's the starting point.
Show Up When It's Hard
Identify one community, relationship, or commitment you've been half-assing. Show up fully — once. At a funeral, a birthday, a difficult conversation. Presence is the thing.
Finish One Book You Started and Abandoned
We abandon books when they start asking something of us. Finish one. Let it ask. The discomfort of finishing is the value of reading.
Notice What's Around You That You've Stopped Seeing
Pick your commute, your neighborhood, your workspace. For 5 minutes, look at it like a stranger. The world becomes new when attention is applied to it.
Read Green's Essay on the Challenger Disaster
The essay 'The Closest Thing to Madness' is one of the finest pieces of nonfiction about decision-making under uncertainty. It will change how you think about risk and responsibility.
← Back to Library"We cannot live only on Earth. We also live in the stories we tell ourselves about Earth. And I believe that we have a responsibility to tell good stories."
— John Green
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