How have I enjoyed the Anthropocene so far? It’s awful! I feel that I am not evolved for this. I have only been here a little while, but already I have seen my kind extinguish the last remaining members of many other kinds—from birds like the Kaua‘i ‘ō‘ō, last seen when I was ten, to trees like the St. Helena olive, the last of which died when I was twenty-six.

“I smell the wound and it smells like me,” Terry Tempest Williams writes in Erosion. I live in a wounded world, and I know I am the wound: Earth destroying Earth with Earth.

What does it mean to live in a world where you have the power to end species by the thousands, but you can also be brought to your knees, or to your end, by a single strand of RNA? I have tried here to map some of the places where my little life brushes up against the big forces shaping contemporary human experience, but the only conclusion I can draw is a simple one: We are so small, and so frail, so gloriously and terrifyingly temporary.

When I think of how I have enjoyed the Anthropocene so far, I think of Robert Frost, who wrote, “Like a piece of ice on a hot stove, the poem must ride on its own melting.” So it is with poems, and so it is with us. Like ice on a hot stove, we must ride on a melting Earth, all the while knowing who is melting it. A species that has only ever found its way to more must now find its way to less.

Sometimes, I wonder how I can survive in this world where, as Mary Oliver put it, “everything / Sooner or later / Is part of everything else.” Other times, I remember that I won’t survive, of course. I will, sooner or later, be the everything that is part of everything else. But until then: What an astonishment to breathe on this breathing planet. What a blessing to be Earth loving Earth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

THANK YOU TO Hank Green, Sarah Urist Green, Rosianna Halse Rojas, Elyse Marshall, and Stan Muller for encouraging this idea in the first place. Mark Olsen and Meredith Danko also gave critical early feedback. Making The Anthropocene Reviewed podcast with WNYC Studios has been an absolute joy thanks to producer Jenny Lawton, composer Hannis Brown, technical director Joe Plourde, and Nadim Silverman. I’m also indebted to Tony Philips and Ashley Lusk, among many others. Niki Hua provided critical notes on many of these essays and taught me about the tempo of “You’ll Never Walk Alone.” Julie Strauss-Gabel has been my editor for now almost twenty years; I am so, so grateful to her for shepherding this book, and for always finding the story when I can’t. Thank you to everyone at Dutton and Penguin, including Anna Booth, Melissa Faulner, Rob Farren, Natalie Vielkind, Jen Loja, Christine Ball, Emily Canders, Stephanie Cooper, Dora Mak, John Parsley, Linda Rosenberg, Amanda Walker, Helen Boomer, Leigh Butler, Kim Ryan, and Grace Han. I’m also thankful for the sage counsel of Jodi Reamer and Kassie Evashevski.