chelsea’s Reviews > The Anthropocene Reviewed: Essays on a Human-Centered Planet > Status Update

Their feet are in the mud, but their heads are in the sky, which is not a bad metaphor about being twenty.

I must be home to do the work I need to do. And yes, home is that house where you no longer live. Home is before, and you live in after.

And I think about the many broad seas that have roared between me and the past-seas of neglect, seas of time, seas of death. I'll never again speak to many of the people who loved me into this moment, just as you will never speak to many of the people who loved you into your now.
So we raise a glass to them—and hope that perhaps somewhere, they are raising a glass to us.

Good journalism seeks to correct for those biases, to help us toward a deeper understanding of the universe and our place in it. But when we can't read the writing on the plywood but still think we know what it says, we are spreading ignorance and bigotry, not the peace and friendship Turner promised.

You can't see the future coming— not the terrors, for sure, but you also can't see the wonders that are coming, the moments of light-soaked joy that await each of us.

It was late at night and New York City glowed pink in the distance. We were the sixth best Academic Decathlon team in the nation, we were getting just the right amount of utility out of our Zimas, and we loved each other. Rivers keep going, and we keep going, and there is no way back to the roof of that hotel. But the memory still holds me together.

We probably didn't know what we were doing thousands of years ago as we hunted some large mammals to extinction. But we know what we're doing now. We know how to tread more lightly upon the earth. We could choose to use less energy, eat less meat, clear fewer forests. And we choose not to. As a result, for many forms of life, humanity is the apocalypse.