The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet

We all know how loving ends. But I want to fall in love with the world anyway, to let it crack me open. I want to feel what there is to feel while I am here. Sendak ended that interview with the last words he ever said in public: “Live your life. Live your life. Live your life.”

Here’s the plain truth, at least as it has been shown to me: We are never far from wonders.

it may seem odd that the world’s most popular football song comes from musical theater. But football is theater, and fans make it musical theater.

Above all, I wanted to understand the contradiction of human power: We are at once far too powerful and not nearly powerful enough. We are powerful enough to radically reshape Earth’s climate and biodiversity, but not powerful enough to choose how we reshape them.

“I began to realize that for two years my life had been a drawing on resources that I did not possess, that I had been mortgaging myself physically and spiritually up to the hilt.”

for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.

The book lays bare the carelessness of the entitled rich—the kind of people who buy puppies but won’t take care of dogs, or who purchase vast libraries of books but never read any of them.

Even separated, we are bound up in each other. As Sarah told me, there are no observers; only participants.

the hand stencils also remind us that humans of the past were as human as we are. Their hands were indistinguishable from ours.

It has taken me all my life up to now to fall in love with the world, but I've started to feel it in the last couple years. To fall in love with the world isn't to ignore or overlook suffering, both human and otherwise. For me anyway, to fall in love with the world is merely to look up at the night sky and feel your mind swim before the beauty and