Page 5 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

Humans making fake cave art to save real cave art may feel like Peak Anthropocene absurdity, but I confess I find it overwhelmingly hopeful that four kids and a dog named Robot discovered a cave containing seventeen-thousand-year-old handprints, that the two teenagers who could stay devoted themselves to the cave’s protection, and that when humans became a danger to that cave’s beauty, we agreed to stop going.

We might have graffitied over the paintings, or kept on visiting them until the black mold ate them away entirely. But we didn’t. We let them live on by sealing them off.

The cave paintings at Lascaux exist. You cannot visit. You can go to the fake cave we’ve built, and see nearly identical hand stencils, but you will know: This is not the thing itself, but a shadow of it. This is a handprint, but not a hand. This is a memory that you cannot return to. And to me, that makes the cave very much like the past it represents.

I give the cave paintings at Lascaux four and a half stars.

SCRATCH ’N’ SNIFF STICKERS

SMELL IS ONE OF THE LAST REALMS where virtual reality still feels deeply virtual. Recently, I found myself at a theme park riding a VR roller coaster that felt breath-stealingly real. It wasn’t just that falling felt like falling and turning felt like turning; I even felt the mist on my face as I flew through ocean spray.

But that water did not smell like the ocean. It smelled like this room deodorizer I’d used in high school called “Spring Rain.” “Spring Rain” didn’t actually smell like spring rain any more than it smelled like the ocean, but the scent did somehow communicate moisture, so I can understand why it had been repurposed as ocean-y. Still, nobody who has ever smelled the salty din of a cresting wave could possibly mistake it for the scent being pumped into that VR experience, and the smell of “Spring Rain” wrenched my mind from its state of joyfully suspended disbelief. Suddenly, I was not on a flying tour of a heaving ocean but instead stuck inside a dark room with a bunch of strangers.

One of the things that makes smell so powerful, of course, is its connection to memory. Helen Keller wrote that smell is “a potent wizard that transports us across a thousand miles and all the years we have lived.” The scent of artificial “Spring Rain” takes me back to an Alabama dorm room in 1993. The smell of actual spring rain, meanwhile, returns me to the drenching thunderstorms of my childhood in Central Florida.

Smell’s radical specificity is part of what connects it so particularly to memory; it’s also part of why imitation is so difficult, even when it comes to artificial odors. The scent of Chanel No. 5, for instance, is not patented, and doesn’t need to be, because no one can re-create it. But I think there’s something else at play with smells that try to mimic nature, which is that nothing in the real world ever smells quite like we imagine it should. Actual spring rain, for instance, seems like it ought to smell at once moist and crisp, like the artificial scent does. But in fact, springtime rain smells earthy and acidic.

Humans, meanwhile, smell like the exhalations of the bacteria that colonize us, a fact we go to extraordinary lengths to conceal, not only via soap and perfume, but also in how we collectively imagine the human scent. If you had an artificial intelligence read every novel ever written and then, based on those stories, guess the human odor, the AI would be spectacularly wrong. In our stories, people smell like vanilla, lavender, and sandalwood. The AI would presume we all smell not like the slowly decaying organic matter we are, but instead like newly mown grass and orange blossoms.

Which, incidentally, were two of the scratch ’n’ sniff sticker scents from my childhood. Scratch ’n’ sniff stickers were wildly popular in the 1980s, and I maintained a collection of them in a large pink sticker book. The stickers fascinated me—if you scratched or rubbed them, scent erupted without explanation. Like most virtual scents, scratch ’n’ sniff smells tend to be rather imperfect simulacrums, which is why the stickers generally depicted the scent they were going for. The pizza-scented stickers were usually slices of pizza, and so on. But they really did smell—often quite overpoweringly.

The smells best captured by scratch ’n’ sniff tend to be either aggressively artificial—cotton candy, for instance—or else straightforwardly chemical. 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.

By the time I was ten or eleven, everyone had moved on from sticker collecting—everyone, that is, except for me. Even in middle school, I continued to surreptitiously collect stickers, especially scratch ’n’ sniff ones, because they took me back to a time and place that felt safer. In sixth grade, I had one class in a trailer each day. Because of some scheduling error, the teacher of that class had to walk across the entire school to get to the trailer, which meant that for about five minutes, we students were all on our own. Many days, a group of kids would throw me to the ground and then grab me by my limbs and pull on me as hard as they could. They called this “the abominable snowman.” Other times, garbage was poured on my head as I sat at my desk. Aside from the physical pain, it made me feel small and powerless. But I didn’t really resist it, because many days it was the only time I had any social interaction. Even when there was wet garbage on my head, I tried to laugh, like I was in on the joke.

When my mom got home from work, she would ask me how school was. If I told the truth, she would hold me and comfort me, encouraging me that this was temporary, that life would get better. But most days I would lie and tell her that school was fine. I didn’t want my hurt to travel through to her. On those days, I would go into my room and pull the pink sticker book out from my bookcase, and I would scratch the stickers, close my eyes, and inhale as deeply as I possibly could.

I had all the hits: Garfield eating chocolate, the lawn mower that smelled like grass, the taco that smelled like tacos. But I particularly loved the fruits—the cloyingly and otherworldly sweet distillations of raspberry and strawberry and banana. God, I loved scratch ’n’ sniff bananas. They didn’t smell like bananas, of course. They smelled like the Platonic ideal of bananas. If real bananas were a note played on a home piano, scratch ’n’ sniff bananas were that same note played on a church’s pipe organ.

Anyway, the weird part is not that I collected scratch ’n’ sniff stickers until I was a teenager. The weird part is, I still have that sticker album. And the stickers, when scratched, still erupt with scent.

Scratch ’n’ sniff stickers are created by a process called microencapsulation, which was originally developed in the 1960s for carbonless copy paper. When you fill out a white paper form and your pen imprints upon the pink and yellow sheets below, that’s microencapsulation at work. Tiny droplets of liquid are encapsulated by a coating that protects those droplets until something decapsulates them. In copy paper, the pressure of a pen releases encapsulated ink. In scratch ’n’ sniff stickers, scratching breaks open microcapsules containing scented oils.

Microencapsulation is used for all kinds of things these days—including time-released medication—and it has proven a useful technology in part because, depending on the coating used, microcapsules can last a while.

How long? Well, I know for a fact that scratch ’n’ sniff stickers can survive for at least thirty-four years, because I just scratched a garbage can sticker I got when I was seven, and it still smells. Not like garbage, exactly, but like something.

The longevity of microcapsules offers a tantalizing possibility: that a smell might disappear from our world before the microencapsulated version of that smell disappears. The last time anyone smells a banana, it might be via a scratch ’n’ sniff sticker, or some futuristic version of one.

This all makes me wonder what smells I’ve already missed out on. When thinking about the past, we tend to focus on the awful smells, which were apparently legion. Ancient writers often showcase an acute awareness of disgusting odors—the Roman poet Martial compares one person’s scent to “a chicken putrefying in an aborted egg” and “a billy goat fresh from making love.”

But there must also have been wonderful smells, many of which are gone now. Or at least gone for now. It’s conceivable that they’ll be back with us in scratch ’n’ sniff form someday: In 2019, scientists at Harvard used DNA samples of an extinct species of Hawaiian mountain hibiscus to reconstitute the smell of its flower. But there’s no real way to judge the scent’s accuracy, since its antecedent is gone forever.

In fact, while I’ve been making distinctions between natural scents and artificial ones, at this point in our planet’s story, many purportedly natural scents are already shaped by human intervention, including the banana. In the U.S. at least, there is only one banana cultivar in most grocery stories, the Cavendish banana, which didn’t exist two hundred years ago and was not widely distributed until the 1950s.

I remember the smell of rain as acidic in part because rain in my childhood actually was more acidic than contemporary rain. Humans were pumping more sulfur dioxide into the atmosphere in the 1980s than they are today, which affects the pH of rain. In my part of the world, rain is still more acidic than it would be without human emissions, so I’m not even sure that I know the smell of “natural” rain.

The challenge for scratch ’n’ sniff sticker makers isn’t, in the end, to mimic the natural world, which doesn’t really exist as a thing separate from humanity. The challenge is to imagine what combination of smells will make humans remember the smell of bananas, or ocean mist, or freshly mown grass. I wouldn’t bet against us finding a way to artificialize scent effectively—God knows we’ve artificialized much else. But we haven’t succeeded yet. When I open that ancient sticker book and scratch at the yellowing stickers curling at the edges, what I smell most is not pizza or chocolate, but my childhood.

I give scratch ’n’ sniff stickers three and a half stars.

DIET DR PEPPER

THE STORY OF DR PEPPER BEGINS IN 1885, in Waco, Texas, where a pharmacist named Charles Alderton combined twenty-three syrup flavors to create a new kind of carbonated drink. Notably, Alderton sold the recipe for Dr Pepper after a few years because he wanted to pursue his passion, pharmaceutical chemistry. He worked at the drug company Eli Lilly before going back to his hometown to head up the laboratory at the Waco Drug Company.*

Alderton’s soda probably would’ve remained a Texas-only phenomenon, eventually disappearing like so many other local soda flavors—the opera bouquet, the swizzle fizz, the almond sponge—had it not been for the dogged determination of Woodrow Wilson Clements, who preferred to be called “Foots,” a nickname he picked up in high school due to his oddly shaped toes. Foots, the youngest of eight children, grew up in the tiny Alabama town of Windham Springs. He got a football scholarship at the University of Alabama, where he was teammates with Bear Bryant.*

In 1935, when Foots was a senior in college, he started working as a Dr Pepper salesman. He retired fifty-one years later as CEO of a soft drink company worth over $400 million. By 2020, the Keurig Dr Pepper corporation, which owns, among many other brands, 7UP, RC Cola, and four different kinds of root beer, is valued at over $40 billion. Almost all of its products are some form of sweetened and/or caffeinated water.