Page 6 of The Anthropocene Reviewed

Foots Clements succeeded because he understood precisely what made Dr Pepper significant. “I’ve always maintained,” he said, “you cannot tell anyone what Dr Pepper tastes like because it’s so different. It’s not an apple; it’s not an orange; it’s not a strawberry; it’s not a root beer; it’s not even a cola.” Cola, after all, is derived from kola nuts and vanilla, two real-world flavors. Sprite has that lemon-lime taste. Purple soda is ostensibly grape-flavored. But Dr Pepper has no natural-world analogue.

In fact, U.S. trademark courts have tackled this issue, categorizing Dr Pepper and its knockoffs as “pepper sodas,” even though they contain no pepper, and the “pepper” in Dr Pepper refers not to the spice but either to someone’s actual name or else to pep, the feeling that Dr* Pepper supposedly fills you with. It’s the only category of soda not named for what it tastes like, which to my mind is precisely why Dr Pepper marks such an interesting and important moment in human history. It was an artificial drink that didn’t taste like anything. It wasn’t like an orange but better, or like a lime but sweet. In an interview, Charles Alderton once said that he wanted to create a soda that tasted like the soda fountain in Waco smelled—all those artificial flavors swirling together in the air. Dr Pepper is, in its very conception, unnatural. The creation of a chemist.

The first zero-calorie version of Dr Pepper was released in 1962. This initial “Dietetic Dr Pepper” was a failure, but Diet Dr Pepper became a huge success when it was reformulated in 1991 with a new artificial sweetener, aspartame. It also relaunched with a new advertising slogan. Diet Dr Pepper: It tastes more like regular Dr Pepper. Which it really does. Coke and Diet Coke are barely recognizable as relatives. If Coke is a golden eagle, Diet Coke is a hummingbird. But Dr Pepper and Diet Dr Pepper taste like each other, which is especially interesting since, as Foots Clements pointed out, neither of them tastes like anything else.

Now, many people find the artificiality of Diet Dr Pepper revolting. You often hear people say, “There are so many chemicals in it.” Of course, there are also lots of chemicals in wine, or coffee, or air. The underlying concern, though, is a sensible one: Diet Dr Pepper is just so profoundly artificial. But that’s why I love it. Diet Dr Pepper allows me to enjoy a relatively safe taste that was engineered for me. When I drink it, I think of the kids at that soda fountain in Waco, Texas, most of whom rarely knew the pleasures of an ice-cold drink of any kind, and how totally enjoyable those first Dr Peppers must’ve been.

Each time I drink Diet Dr Pepper, I am newly astonished. Look at what humans can do! They can make ice-cold, sugary-sweet, zero-calorie soda that tastes like everything and also like nothing. I don’t labor under the delusion that Diet Dr Pepper is good for me, but, in moderation, it also probably isn’t bad for me. Drinking too much Diet Dr Pepper can be bad for your teeth and may increase other health risks. But as Dr. Aaron Carroll puts it in his book The Bad Food Bible, “There’s a potential—and, likely, very real—harm from consuming added sugar. There is likely none from artificial sweeteners.”

So Diet Dr Pepper probably isn’t a health risk for me. And yet I feel as if I’m committing a sin whenever I drink Diet Dr Pepper. Nothing that sweet can be truly virtuous. But it’s an exceptionally minor vice, and for whatever reason, I’ve always felt like I need a vice. I don’t know whether this feeling is universal, but I have some way-down vibrating part of my subconscious that needs to self-destruct, at least a little bit.

In my teens and early twenties, I smoked cigarettes compulsively, thirty or forty a day. The pleasure of smoking for me wasn’t about a buzz; the pleasure came from the jolt of giving in to an unhealthy physical craving, which over time increased my physical cravings, which in turn increased the pleasure of giving in to them. I haven’t smoked in more than fifteen years, but I don’t think I ever quite escaped that cycle. There remains a yearning within my subconscious that cries out for a sacrifice, and so I offer up a faint shadow of a proper vice and drink Diet Dr Pepper, the soda that tastes more like the Anthropocene than any other.

After going through dozens of slogans through the decades—Dr Pepper billed itself as “tasting like liquid sunshine,” as the “Pepper picker-upper,” as the “most original soft drink ever”—these days the company’s slogan is more to the point. They call it “the one you crave.”

I give Diet Dr Pepper four stars.

VELOCIRAPTORS

UNTIL 1990, when Michael Crichton’s novel Jurassic Park was published, velociraptors were not particularly well-known dinosaurs. The book, about a theme park containing dinosaurs created from cloned DNA samples, became a runaway bestseller. Three years later, Steven Spielberg’s film adaptation brought the novel’s dinosaurs to awe-inspiring life with computer-generated animations the likes of which moviegoers had never seen. Even decades later, Jurassic Park’s dinosaurs still look astonishingly lifelike, including the velociraptors, which are portrayed as scaly creatures, about six feet in height, from present-day Montana. In the film franchise, they are not just vicious but also terrifyingly intelligent. In Jurassic Park III, a character claims that velociraptors are “smarter than dolphins, smarter than primates.” In the movies, they figure out how to open a door—in fact, the first time I remember hearing my brother, Hank, curse came as we were watching Jurassic Park. When the velociraptors turned the door handle, I heard my ten-year-old brother mutter, “Oh, shit.”

Crichton’s velociraptors are the kind of scary, intimidating animal you might want to name, say, a professional sports franchise after, and indeed, when the National Basketball Association expanded into Canada in 1995, Toronto chose the Raptors as its team name. Today, the velociraptor stands alongside T. rex and stegosaurus as among the best-known dinosaurs, even though the actual creatures that lived in the late Cretaceous period some seventy million years ago have almost nothing in common with the velociraptors of our contemporary imagination.

For starters, velociraptors did not live in what is now Montana; they lived in what is now Mongolia and China, hence the scientific name, Velociraptor mongoliensis. While they were smart for dinosaurs, they were not smarter than dolphins or primates; they were probably closer to chickens or possums. And they were not six feet tall; they were about the size of a contemporary turkey, but with a long tail that could stretch for over three feet. They are estimated to have weighed less than thirty-five pounds, so it’s difficult to imagine one killing a human. In fact, they were probably mostly scavengers, eating meat from already dead carcasses.

Furthermore, velociraptors were not scaly but feathered. We know this because researchers found quill knobs on a velociraptor’s forearm in 2007. But even in Crichton’s day, most paleontologists thought velociraptors and other members of the Dromaeosauridae family were feathered. Although velociraptors are not believed to have flown, their ancestors probably did. Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History put it this way: “The more we learn about these animals, the more we find out that there is basically no difference between birds and their closely related dinosaur ancestors like velociraptor. Both have wishbones, brooded their nests, possess hollow bones, and were covered in feathers. If animals like velociraptor were alive today, our first impression would be that they were just very unusual looking birds.” Indeed, as a guide recently pointed out to me at the Houston Museum of Natural Science, pictures of birds without feathers look a lot like pictures of dinosaurs.

Velociraptors probably did sometimes hunt. A famous fossil discovered in 1971 in Mongolia preserved a velociraptor locked in battle with a pig-sized dinosaur called protoceratops. The velociraptor appears to have had one of its sickle-shaped claws embedded in the neck of the protoceratops, which was biting down on the velociraptor’s arm when they were both suddenly buried in sand, perhaps due to a collapsing sand dune. But we don’t know how often velociraptors hunted, or how successfully, or whether they hunted in packs.

Crichton based his velociraptors on a different dinosaur, the deinonychus, which did live in present-day Montana and was the approximate size and shape of Jurassic Park’s velociraptors. Crichton took the name “velociraptor” because he thought it was “more dramatic,” which presumably is also why the theme park is called Jurassic Park even though most of the dinosaurs in the park did not live in the Jurassic age, which ended one hundred and forty-five million years ago, but instead in the Cretaceous age, which ended sixty-six million years ago with the extinction event that resulted in the disappearance of around three-quarters of all plant and animal species on Earth, including all large species of what we now consider dinosaurs.

And so our image of velociraptors says more about us than it does about them. Really, even what we do know, or think we know, about dinosaurs is endlessly shaped by assumptions and presuppositions, some of which will eventually prove incorrect. In ancient China, dinosaur fossils were believed to be dragon bones. In 1676, the first dinosaur bone to be described by European scientists, a piece of thigh bone from a Megalosaurus, was thought to have come from the kind of giants depicted in the Bible.*

Megalosaurus was first described in a scientific journal in 1824, around the time the paleontologist Mary Ann Mantell discovered the first known fossils of an iguanodon. The Tyrannosaurus rex wasn’t named until 1905. The first velociraptor fossil was discovered in 1924.

Scientists have been debating for more than a century whether the long-necked brontosaurus of the Jurassic age even existed or is just a misidentified apatosaurus. The brontosaurus was real in the late nineteenth century, only to become a fiction for much of the twentieth, only to become real again in the last few years. History is new. Prehistory is newer. And paleontology is newer still.

But the weird thing to me about velociraptors is that even though I know they were feathered scavengers about the size of a swan, when I imagine them, I can’t help but see the raptors of Jurassic Park. Knowing the facts doesn’t help me picture the truth. That’s the wonder and terror of computer-generated images for me: If they look real, my brain isn’t nearly sophisticated enough to understand they are not. We’ve long known that images are unreliable—Kafka wrote that “nothing is as deceptive as a photograph”—and yet I still can’t help but believe them.

Like the velociraptor, I have a large brain for my geologic age, but maybe not large enough to survive effectively in the world where I find myself. My eyes still believe what they see, long after visual information stops being reliable. Still, I’m fond of raptors—both the ones I’ve seen that never existed, and the ones that existed but I’ve never seen.

I give velociraptors three stars.

CANADA GEESE

THE CANADA GOOSE is a brown-bodied, black-necked, honking waterfowl that has recently become ubiquitous in suburban North America, Europe, and New Zealand. With a song like a dying balloon and a penchant for attacking humans, the Canada goose is hard to love. But then again, so are most of us.*

These days, the world contains between four and six million Canada geese, although from where I’m sitting in Indianapolis, that estimate feels low, as there appear to be four to six million of them currently residing in my backyard. Regardless, global Canada goose populations are growing, but they were once exceptionally rare. In fact, the subspecies you’re most likely to see in parks and retention ponds, the giant Canada goose, was believed to be extinct early in the twentieth century due to year-round, unrestricted hunting.

Canada geese were particularly susceptible to so-called “live decoys.” Hunters captured geese, rendered them flightless, and kept them in ponds or fields. The call of these captured geese then attracted flocks of wild ones, which could be shot. Hunters often doted on their live decoys. A hunter named Philip Habermann wrote, “Watching and listening to the decoys work was akin to the pleasure of hunting with a fine dog,” a reminder that humans have long drawn strange lines between pet and prey.

But in 1935, live decoys were made illegal, and goose populations began to recover—very slowly at first, and then spectacularly.

In mid-January 1962, Harold C. Hanson was among the ornithologists who sought to band, weigh, and measure some Minnesota geese. “On that memorable day,” he would later write, “the temperature held around zero and a strong wind blew but this only added zest to the enterprise.” The geese they weighed were so huge that they thought the scales must be off, but no: It turned out the giant Canada goose had survived. These days, there are over one hundred thousand giant Canada geese in Minnesota. Non-native populations of the geese have exploded from Australia to Scandinavia. In Britain, the Canada goose population has risen by a factor of at least twenty in the past sixty years.

This success is partly down to those laws protecting the birds, but also because in the past several decades, humans have rendered lots of land perfect for geese. Heavily landscaped suburbs, riverside parks, and golf courses with water features are absolutely ideal living conditions for them. Canada geese especially love eating seeds from the Poa pratensis plant, which is the most abundant agricultural crop in the United States. Also known as Kentucky bluegrass, we grow Poa pratensis in parks and in our front yards, and since the plant is of limited utility to humans,* geese must feel like we plant it just for them. One ornithologist observed, “Goslings and adults were found to show a marked preference for Poa pratensis from about 36 hours after hatching.”

Geese also enjoy rural fields near rivers and lakes, but the ratio of city geese to country geese in the United States is actually quite similar to the human ratio. At any given time, about 80 percent of American humans are in or near urban areas. For Canada geese, it’s about 75 percent.