Mental caravan.
It is the phrase that appears on the penultimate page of Diane Ackerman’s new book, “The Human Age.” The two words bracket all that has come before in this wide-ranging exploration of our world right now. This mini-history of our slurry epoch. This summary of human plunder and residual wonder. This panoramic investigation of vertical ocean gardening, geo-friendly architecture, Wakodahatchee Wetlands, the “bounty” that grows on planted urban walls, the coming age of regenerative medicine. This poetic treatise on microbes and the medicinal power of human touch.
Who are we right now? What troubles have we stirred? How might our imaginations save us? Undaunted by the magnitude of planetary needs, Ackerman applies her trademark exuberance to finding out and reporting back. She is a naturalist and a poet. Her earlier books have demonstrated the mystery and power of language (“One Hundred Names for Love”), the grandeur of moral activism (“The Zookeeper’s Wife”) and the intimacies of a backyard garden (“Cultivating Delight”), among other things. She is boundlessly, indefatigably curious.
Ackerman wants us to know about the “biological extravaganza” of us. She wants us apprised of the “freeze-dried woolly mammoth crystals” that may or may not make their way to a live birth. She wants to make sure we’ve heard the news about 3D printers that may be the first-choice packing item on your next arctic expedition (why not simply print, on site, all the stuff you need?) or key to your next medical emergency. She wants to be sure that we live well right now, which is to say, we might consider decoupling ourselves, at least for a few hours each day, from some of our machines:
The farther we distance ourselves from the spell of the present, explored by all our senses, the harder it will be to understand and protect nature’s precarious balance, let alone the balance of our own human nature. I worry about our virtual blinders. Hobble all the senses except the visual, and you produce curiously deprived voyeurs.
Ackerman wants, in other words, for us to think about what it means to be “Anthropocene,” a term introduced by Nobel Laureate Paul Crutzen and Eugene F. Stoermer in 2000 to help shine the light on all that humans have done to shape and shake the planet as well as the need to “develop a world-wide accepted strategy leading to sustainability of ecosystems against human-induced stresses.”
As a proper-noun concept, Anthropocene has been carried forward to the public by sustainability artists, green revolutionaries and the work of extraordinary writers like Elizabeth Kolbert. It can be a dark term, a nightmare forecast, a castigation, a screed, this Anthropocene.
But Ackerman is inherently hopeful as she plumbs the currents of now. She writes as a private citizen, as a woman with an endless capacity to be charmed, as one willing to be inspired by a cadre of scientific, forward-leaning visionaries. She isn’t just beguiled by mankind’s ingenuity; she has faith in it. Wonder is her generative mood. Optimism is her book’s overriding ambience. We have plundered, raked, rearranged, dammed and fogged up our earth and her creatures — Ackerman fully understands. Even so, Ackerman locates the pixie dust of possibility:
We’re undergoing a revolution in thinking that isn’t a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, nor is it a back-to-the-land movement of the sort that became popular during the Great Depression and again in the 1970s. We might sometimes resemble startled deer in the headlights as we face Earth’s dwindling resources, yet at the same time we’re opening a door to a full-scale sustainability revolution. Our fundamental ideas about house and city have begun evolving into the smarter, greener matrix of our survival.
Part immersion memoir and part journalism, more inclined toward broadly sweeping and synthesizing observations than to in-depth scientific reporting, “The Human Age” is also many parts poetry. No moment, for Ackerman, goes unobserved. Even here, while interviewing a scientist now home-growing human ears, Ackerman brings her inspiring observatory powers to a small but wonder-filled scene: “Outside there is the frail enchantment of snow, and a school bus creeping by like the orange pupa of some colorful butterfly.”
Sometimes, it might be argued, Ackerman takes the poeticizing too far. Here, for example, the succession of adjectives seems to place the emphasis on the language itself, on the hunt for the right modifiers, instead of the message.
We’re in the midst of a majestic Information Age, but also an ingenious sustainability revolution, a deluxe 3D revolution in manufacturing, a spine-tingling revolution in thinking about the body, a scary mass extinction of animals, alarming signs of climate change, an uncanny nanotechnology revolution, industrial-strength add-ons to our senses, a biomimicry revolution — among so many other “new normals” that we sling the phrase daily.
Quibbles aside, there is something for everyone here. News from afar and news from up close. Prophesies of possibility. Hope and wonder — for aren’t we all desperate for both?
Beth Kephart is the award-winning author of 18 books including, most recently, “Handling the Truth: On the Writing of Memoir” and “Going Over,” a Berlin Wall novel.
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“The Human Age”
By Diane Ackerman, W.W. Norton, 344 pages, $27.95