Top Quotes: “The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet” — John Green
“The five-star scale has only been used in critical analysis for the past few decades. While it was occasionally applied to film criticism as early as the 1950s, the five-star scale wasn’t used to rate hotels until 1979, and it wasn’t widely used to rate books until Amazon introduced user reviews.”
“The five-star scale was applied not just to books and films but to public restrooms and wedding photographers. The medication I take to treat my obsessive-compulsive disorder has more than 1,100 ratings at Drugs.com, with an average score of 3.8.”
“”Modern humans,” as we are called by paleontologists, have been around for about 250,000 years. This is our so-called “temporal range, the length of time weve our so-called “temporal range,” the length of time we’ve been a species, Contemporary elephants are at least ten times older than us — their temporal range extends back to the Pliocene Epoch, which ended more than 2.5 million years ago. Alpacas have been around for something like 10 million years — forty times longer than us. The tuatara, a species of reptile that lives in New Zealand, first emerged around 240 million years ago. They’ve been here a thousand times longer than we have, since before Earth’s supercontinent of Pangaea began to break apart.
We are younger than polar bears and coyotes and blue whales and camels.”
“A rotten eggsy odor is added to natural gas so that humans can smell a gas leak, and in 1987, the Baltimore Gas and Electric Company sent out scratch ‘n’ sniff cards to their customers that mimicked the odor so effectively that several hundred people called the fire department to report leaks. The cards were soon discontinued.”
“Foots Clements succeeded because he understood precisely what made Dr Pepper significant. “I’ve always maintained,” he said, “you cannot tell anyone what Dr Pepper tastes like because it’s so different. It’s not an apple; it’s not an orange; it’s not a strawberry; it’s not a root beer; it’s not even a cola.” Cola, after all, is derived from kola nuts and vanilla, two real-world flavors. Sprite has that lemon-lime taste. Purple soda is ostensibly grape-flavored. But Dr Pepper has no natural-world analogue.
In fact, U.S. trademark courts have tackled this issue, categorizing Dr Pepper and its knockoffs as “pepper sodas,” even though they contain no pepper, and the “pepper” in Dr Pepper refers not to the spice but either to someone’s actual name or else to pep, the feeling that Dr Pepper supposedly fills you with. It’s the only category of soda not named for what it tastes like, which to my mind is precisely why Dr Pepper marks such an interesting and important moment in human history. It was an artificial drink that didn’t taste like anything. It wasn’t like an orange but better, or like a lime but sweet.”
“For starters, velociraptors did not live in what is now Montana; they lived in what is now Mongolia and China, hence the scientific name, Velociraptor mongoliensis. While they were smart for dinosaurs, they were not smarter than dolphins or primates; they were probably closer to chickens or possums. And they were not six feet tall; they were about the size of a contemporary turkey, but with a long tail that could stretch for over three feet. They are estimated to have weighed less than thirty-five pounds, so it’s difficult to imagine one killing a human. In fact, they were probably mostly scavengers, eating meat from already dead carcasses.
Furthermore, velociraptors were not scaly but feathered.”
“Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History put it this way: “The more we learn about these animals, the more we find out that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today, our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.” Indeed, as a guide recently pointed out to me at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, pictures of birds without feathers look a lot like pictures of dinosaurs.
Velociraptors probably did sometimes hunt. A famous fossil discovered in 1971 in Mongolia preserved a velociraptor locked in battle with a pig-sized dinosaur called protoceratops. The velociraptor appears to have had one of its sickle-shaped claws embedded in the neck of the protoceratops, which was biting down on the velociraptor’s arm when they were both suddenly buried in sand, perhaps due to a collapsing sand dune. But we don’t know how often velociraptors hunted, or how successfully, or whether they hunted in packs.
Crichton based his velociraptors on a different dinosaur, the deinonychus, which did live in present-day Montana and was the approximate size and shape of Jurassic Park’s velociraptors. Crichton took the name “velociraptor” because he thought it was “more dramatic.””
“The subspecies you’re most likely to see in parks and retention ponds, the giant Canada goose, was believed to be extinct early in the twentieth century due to year-round, unrestricted hunting.”
“Humans have rendered lots of land perfect for geese. Heavily landscaped suburbs, riverside parks, and golf courses with water features are absolutely ideal living conditions for them. Canada geese especially love eating seeds from the Poa pratensis plant, which is the most abundant agricultural crop in the United States. Also known as Kentucky bluegrass, we grow Poa pratensis in parks and in our front yards, and since the plant is of limited utility to humans, geese must feel like we plant it just for them. One ornithologist observed, “Goslings and adults were found to show a marked preference for Poa pratensis from about 36 hours after hatching.”
Geese also enjoy rural fields near rivers and lakes, but the ratio of city geese to country geese in the United States is actually quite similar to the human ratio. At any given time, about 80 percent of American humans are in or near urban areas. For Canada geese, it’s about 75 percent.”
“THE ENGLISH WORD BEAR comes to us from a Germanic root, bero, meaning “the brown one” or “the brown thing.” In some Scandinavian languages, the word for bear derives from the phrase “honey eaters.” Many linguists believe these names are substitutes, created because speaking or writing the actual word for bear was considered taboo. Northern Europeans often did not say their actual word for bear, perhaps because it was believed saying the bear’s true name could summon one. In any case, this taboo was so effective that today we are left with only the replacement word for bear — essentially, we call them “You Know Who.””
“The hunting party’s dogs chased a bear for hours before Roosevelt gave up and returned to camp for some lunch.
Roosevelt’s hunting guide that day, a man named Holt Collier, continued to track the bear with his dogs as the president ate lunch. Collier had been born enslaved in Mississippi, and after Emancipation became one of the world’s most accomplished horse riders. (He also killed over three thousand bears in his lifetime.) While Roosevelt was away, Collier’s dogs cornered the bear. Collier blew a bugle to alert the president, but before Roosevelt returned, Collier had to club the bear with a rifle butt because it was mauling one of his dogs.
By the time the president arrived on the scene, the bear was tied to a tree and semiconscious. Roosevelt refused to shoot it, feeling it would be unsportsmanlike.
Word of the president’s compassion spread throughout the country, especially after a cartoon in the Washington Post by Clifford Berryman illustrated the event. In the cartoon, the bear is reimagined as an innocent cub with a round face and large eyes looking toward Roosevelt with meek desperation.
Morris and Rose Michtom, Russian immigrants living in Brooklyn, saw that cartoon and were inspired to create a stuffed version of the cartoon cub they called “Teddy’s Bear.” The bear was placed in the window of their candy shop and became an immediate hit. Curiously, a German firm independently produced a similar teddy bear around the same time, and both companies ended up becoming hugely successful. The German manufacturer, Steiff, had been founded a couple decades earlier by Margarete Steiff, and her nephew Richard designed the Steiff teddy bear. By 1907, they were selling nearly a million of them per year. That same year, back in Brooklyn, the Michtoms used their teddy bear sales to found the company Ideal Toys, which went on to manufacture a huge array of popular twentieth-century playthings, from the game Mouse Trap to the Rubik’s Cube.”
“Insulin, many antibiotics, nitroglycerin, and lots of other drugs are heat sensitive and can lose their efficacy if not stored at so-called “room temperature,” which is defined as between 68 and 77 degrees Fahrenheit, temperatures that no rooms in summertime Phoenix could have hoped to achieve before air-conditioning. Climate-controlled drug storage remains one of the big challenges for healthcare systems in poor countries, where many health facilities have no electricity.
Even the reading experience you’re having right now is contingent upon air-conditioning — this book was printed in an air-conditioned facility. In fact, air-conditioning was invented for a facility not too dissimilar from the one that printed this book. In 1902, a young engineer named Willis Carrier was tasked with solving a problem in Buffalo, New York: A printing company’s magazine pages were warping due to summertime humidity. Carrier created a device that essentially reversed the process of electric heating, running air through cold coils instead of hot ones. This reduced humidity, but it also had the useful side effect of decreasing indoor temperatures. Carrier went on to make more inquiries into what he called “treating air,” and the company he cofounded, the Carrier Corporation, remains one of the largest air-conditioning manufacturers in the world.”
“One of the weirdnesses of the Anthropocene is that in the wealthier parts of the world, heat is now more of a health problem in mild climates than in hot ones. Over the past twenty years, people living in usually cool central France, where home AC is uncommon, have been far more likely to die from heat waves than people living in usually sweltering Phoenix, where over 90 percent of households have at least some form of air-conditioning.”
“A Cornell University study in 2004 found that office temperatures affect workplace productivity. When temperatures were increased from 68 degrees Fahrenheit to 77, typing output rose by 150 percent and error frequency dropped by 44 percent. This is no small matter – the author of the study said it suggested “raising the temperature to a more comfortable thermal zone saves employers about two dollars per worker, per hour.” Why, then, are so many summertime office environments so cool when it is both more expensive and less efficient to keep summertime temperatures low? Perhaps because the definition of “room temperature” has historically been established by analyzing the temperature preferences of forty-year-old, 154-pound men wearing business suits. Studies have consistently found that on average women prefer warmer indoor temperatures.”
“Every school’s AcaDec team has nine players: You get three A students, with grade point averages above 3.75; three B students, with GPAs above 3; and three C students, whose GPAs are 2.99 or below.”
“Piggly Wiggly and the self-service grocery stores that followed did bring down prices, which meant there was more to eat. They also changed the kinds of foods that were readily available – to save costs and limit spoilage, Piggly Wiggly stocked less fresh produce than traditional grocery stores. Prepackaged, processed foods became more popular and less expensive, which altered American diets. Brand recognition also became extremely im-portant, because food companies had to appeal directly to shoppers, which led to the growth of consumer-oriented food advertising on radio and in newspapers. National brands like Campbell Soup and OREO cookies exploded in popularity; by 1920, Campbell was the nation’s top soup brand and OREO the top cookie brand – which they still are today.”
“After losing control of the company, he quickly developed a new concept for a grocery store. This one would have aisles and self-service but also clerks in the meat department and the bakery. Essentially, he invented the supermarket model that would reign into the twenty-first century.”
“Unedited footage was being broadcast from the city, and we watched as a cameraman panned across a home with a huge hole in one of its walls that was mostly covered by a piece of plywood. There was Arabie graffiti scrawled in black spray paint on the plywood, and the reporter on the news was talking about the anger in the street, and the hatred. Hassan started to laugh.
I asked him what was so funny, and he said, “The graffiti.”
And I said, “What’s funny about it?”
Hassan answered, “It says ‘Happy birthday, sir, despite the circumstances.””
“Poa pratensis, as it is known to the scientific community, is ubiquitous the world over. Much of the time when you see a soft, green expanse of lawn, you’re looking at least in part at Kentucky bluegrass. The plant is native to Europe, northern Asia, and parts of North Africa, but according to the Invasive Species Compendium, it is now present on every continent, including Antarctica.
The typical shoot of Poa pratensis has three to four leaves, shaped like little canoes, and if left unmown, it can grow to three feet tall and sprout blue flower heads. But it is rarely left unmown, at least not in my neighborhood, where it is illegal to allow your grass to grow more than six inches long.”
“More land and more water are devoted to the cultivation of lawn grass in the United States than to corn and wheat combined. There are around 163,000 square kilometers of lawn in the U.S., greater than the size of Ohio, or the entire nation of Italy. Almost one-third of all residential water use in the U.S. – clean, drinkable water – is dedicated to lawns. To thrive, Kentucky bluegrass often requires fertilizer and pesticides and complex irrigation systems, all of which we offer up to the plant in abundance, even though it cannot be eaten by humans or used for anything except walking and playing on. The U.S.’s most abundant and labor-intensive crop is pure, unadulterated ornamentation.”
“It’s a great story; so great, in fact, that many copies of Monopoly have been printed with Darrow’s biography alongside the rules. Today, there’s even a plaque in Atlantic City celebrating Charles Darrow. The only problem with the story is that Charles Darrow did not invent Monopoly. Almost thirty years earlier, a woman named Elizabeth Magie created a board game called the Landlord’s Game. As detailed in Mary Pilon’s wonderful book The Monopolists, Magie was a writer and actor who supported her artistic pursuits with a career as a stenographer and typist, work that she hated. “I wish to be constructive,” she once said, “not a mere mechanical tool for transmitting a man’s spoken thoughts to letter paper.”
In her lifetime, Mage was best known for a newspaper ad in which she offered herself up for sale to the highest bidder. She described herself as “not beautiful, but very attractive,” and a woman of “strong bohemian characteristics.” The ad, which made national news, was meant to call attention to the discrimination against women in every aspect of American life, which forced them out of the workforce and into subservient roles in marriage. She told a reporter, “We are not machines. Girls have minds, desires, hopes, and ambitions.”
Magie also felt that no feminist movement could succeed without larger changes in the economic system. “In a short time,” she said, “men and women will discover that they are poor because Carnegie and Rockefeller have more maybe than they know what to do with.” To help show this to the world, in 1906 Magie created the Landlord’s Game. Magie was a follower of Henry George, an economist who believed, as Antonia Noori Farzan put it in the Washington Post, “that railroads, telegraphs, and utilities should be publicly owned, rather than controlled by monopolies, and that land should be considered common property.”
Magie designed the Landlord’s Game to illustrate George’s ideas, and believed that as children played it, they would “see clearly the gross injustice of our present land system.””
“Magie released her game with two sets of rules. In one, the goal – like contemporary Monopoly – was to impoverish your opponents and acquire land monopolies. In the other set of rules, “all were rewarded when wealth was created,” as Pilon put it. One set of rules showcased how rent systems enriched landlords while keeping tenants poor, leading to capital over time concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. The other set sought to suggest a better way – in which wealth generated by the many was shared by the many.
Here’s how much Charles Darrow did not invent Monopoly: Marven Gardens is a neighborhood near Atlantic City. In Charles Todd’s version of the game, which he learned by way of Ruth Hoskins, the neighborhood is misspelled as Marvin Gardens. That misspelling is repeated in Darrow’s version of the game, because Charles Darrow didn’t invent Monopoly.
So the story we hear of an individual rightly rewarded for his genius turns out to be a far more complicated story of a woman who created a game that thousands of collaborators then improved by playing it. A story of capitalism working turns out to be a story of capitalism failing. So many people got robbed by Darrow’s monopolism, but Elizabeth Magie’s loss is especially galling, because it wasn’t only her game that got buried by Monopoly but also the ideals she worked so hard to share. Magie’s rebuke of unregulated extractive capitalism was transformed into a celebration of getting rich by making others poor.
In the game of Monopoly, power and resources get unjustly distributed until one individual ends up with everything, and only in that sense is it Charles Darrow’s game. Still, more than a hundred years after Mage first debuted the Landlord’s Game, Hasbro continues to credit Charles Darrow as the inventor of Monopoly, and will say of Elizabeth Magie only, “There have been a number of popular property trading games throughout history. Elizabeth Magie – a writer, inventor, and feminist – was one of the pioneers of land-grabbing games.””
“SUPER MARIO KART IS A RACING GAME, first released in 1992 for the Super Nintendo, in which characters from the Mario universe squat atop go-karts, rather like I do when trying to ride my daughter’s tricycle. It was initially slated to be a game with Formula One-style cars, but technical constraints forced the designers to build tightly woven tracks that folded in on themselves, the kind that only go-karts can navigate.”
“One of the strange things about adulthood is that you are your current self, but you are also all the selves you used to be, the ones you grew out of but can’t ever quite get rid of.”
“As we entered the city, I was struck mostly by its eerie silence. There was not a single person out on the streets, even though the weather wasn’t that bad. It was a Friday in summer, and I had imagined a small city where people walked all day to the butcher and the baker and the candlestick maker or whatever. Instead, the town was utterly still.
About four blocks from our hotel, the cab driver said, “This is good.” He stopped and asked us to pay him. We expressed an interest in his driving us all the way to our hotel, but he said, “No, it is too much. It is too, what do you say, too much stress.”
From my perspective, it didn’t seem too stressful to drive on these empty streets, but whatever, I’m not an expert in Icelandic driving. We got out of the cab and began wheeling our suitcases down a wide, abandoned sidewalk in central Reykjavik. What I remember most is the sound of our suitcase wheels on the sidewalk’s stone tiles, the noise overwhelming amid such silence.
And then, from nowhere and everywhere, simultaneously, came a shout followed by a groan. The entire city, hidden somewhere inside the buildings all around us, seemed to have made the exact same noise at the exact same moment.
“That was weird,” Ryan said, and we began speculating on why the city was locked down. Maybe there’d been some kind of weather threat that tourists weren’t made aware of. Maybe it was a national indoor holiday.
“Maybe,” Laura said, “they’re all watching the same thing on TV?”
And at that moment, the city’s silence burst apart. A tremendous roar erupted all around us. People poured out of every doorway – out of homes and stores and bars, and into the streets. They were screaming in exaltation, all of them, yelling, “YYYAAAAAAAAAA!” Many of them had their faces painted in the colors of the Icelandic flag, and quite a lot of them were openly weeping. A tall fellow around my age picked me up and held me up to the sky like I was Simba in The Lion King and then embraced me as he wept. Someone draped a scarf around Ryan’s neck.
“What the hell is happening?” Sarah asked, with her trademark precision.
Beers were handed around. We took some. The initial chaos of screaming soon organized itself into song, songs that were apparently very emotional, because everyone except for us was crying as they sang in the streets. Some people had to sit down on the curbs in order to sob properly. The crowd continued to swell.
There are 120,000 people in Reykjavik, and they were all on the streets, all seemingly on this street. Making it to our hotel was an impossibility now. We were in the throng, amidst some great wave of human experience, and all we could hope for was to hold on to our suitcases.
As one song ended and everyone began to shout again, I decided to try it myself. I lifted my unopened can of beer into the air and shouted “YAAAAAAA!” Although I did not know what we were celebrating, I felt exultant.
I loved Iceland. I loved Reykjavík. I loved these people, whose tears and sweat smudged their red, white, and blue face paint.
Eventually, we were able to ascertain that Iceland had just secured its first-ever team Olympic medal.”
