The end of the world will arrive someday, perhaps prompted by a comet, an atomic bomb or a Second Coming, author John Green says.
How simple it might be to live in a world we cannot help or influence. “But we do not live in such a world, not yet. And because it is not yet that hour, we have work to do,” Green said Wednesday February 5 during a talk in Leighton Concert Hall in the DeBartolo Performing Arts Center at Notre Dame.
Green spoke to a largely student audience about the human condition, offering his thoughts on mortality, the power and fragility of humanity, and his own religious faith.
This year, about 80 percent of the 5 million children who will die before the age of 5 won’t really die because of malaria, diarrhea or tuberculosis, he said. They will die because of poverty — from diseases that would be curable if impoverished communities had universal access to adequate healthcare.
Progress has been made. In 2024, about 4.9 million children died before the age of five, compared to 12 million deaths in that age group in 1995.
What Green proposes is radical hope — faith in practice.
“Someday we will no longer have the opportunity to work together to bring about a world where everyone is treated as fully human by the social order. Someday we will lose the opportunity to make progress on child mortality, but not today. We must not allow our cacophonous fear of what’s coming drown out the cries of what’s already here,” he said.
“What a gift it is to be here at all, to be living in the not yet,” he said. “The only moment we get — a moment in time where we can work with and for each other in love and solidarity to bring about a world where everyone who thirsts can drink their fill.”
Green is the author of numerous books, including The Fault in Our Stars, Turtles All the Way Down and The Anthropocene Reviewed. He also creates videos, including YouTube offerings, with his brother, Hank Green. His next book, Everything is Tuberculosis: The History and Persistence of Our Deadliest Infection, will be released March 18.
His presentation was the 2025 John Ruskin Birthday Lecture, hosted by the University’s John J. Reilly Center for Science, Technology and Values. He spoke in the lecture and in conversation with Robert Goulding, an associate professor in the Program of Liberal Studies and director of the Reilly Center.
Following are selections from Green’s remarks.
On writing:
Writing is how I figure out what I feel about something or what I think about something. For me, writing is a way of organizing my thoughts and almost to some extent a way of having thoughts. I can’t imagine how I would have them without writing.
And so I don’t start out writing for an audience. Usually I start out writing to organize something in my mind or to bring myself a little jolt of pleasure to escape the weird body-shaped prison in which my consciousness finds itself. And then slowly that develops into a desire to write for an audience.
On climate change:
I do not believe that climate change will herald the end of the world or, at least, that it needs to. But in a way, I think what’s coming could be worse than a mere apocalypse. It may instead be a generations-long decline in the planet’s habitability by humans, a decline that harms first and disproportionately the most marginalized people, the impoverished and vulnerable, who of course are the people least responsible for global carbon emissions.
On worrying about the end the world:
One of the great ironies of humans worrying so much about the apocalypse is that we often forget that for many species we are the apocalypse. We’ve caused the extinction not just of dodo birds and passenger pigeons and white rhinos in the last few centuries, but likely also large mammals like giant sloths and wooly mammoths over 10,000 years ago.
Perhaps in our apocalyptic visions, we like to grapple with our own power, in part because these days it is so scary to grapple with our weakness and fragility, our absolute dependence upon one another, upon chance and upon human-built systems that are unjust in their very creation — from healthcare systems that the poorest cannot reliably and affordably access to an education system that is intentionally organized around accepting the few and excluding the many.
On his religious faith:
The truth is I don’t care if God is really real. I know this is varying degrees of heretical, but I just can't bring myself to find the question particularly interesting for me. Debating God's ‘existence’ feels a bit like the medieval theologians debating how many angels can fit on the head of a pin. It's only important if you want to know how many angels fit on the head of a pin. And I don't don't want to know. I don't need to know.
What I need to know is what to do with the strange miracle of human consciousness, how to live and grieve and hope in a world where everything we're certain of will end. And for me, the life of Jesus and the disciples offers a path.
Margaret Fosmoe is an associate editor of this magazine.