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Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
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About This Book
The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it?That man should have dominion "over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth" is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. She meets scientists who are trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, which lives in a single, tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave. She visits a lava field in Iceland, where engineers are turning carbon emissions to stone; an aquarium in Australia, where researchers are trying to develop "super coral" that can survive on a hotter globe; and a lab at Harvard, where physicists are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back to space and cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
Reviews
"But this new planet seems like it's going to be a lot less hospitable to our 'project of civilization' than the one we've started with."
"A master elucidator, Kolbert is gratifyingly direct as she assesses our predicament between a rock and a hard place, creating a clarion and invaluable 'book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.'"
"It is, then, a superb and honest reflection of our extraordinary time."
"[Kolbert's] narrative voice is steady and restrained — the better, it sometimes seems, to allow an unadorned reality to show through, its contours unimpeded by frantic alarmism or baroque turns of phrase ..."
"A sobering and realistic look at humankind's perhaps misplaced faith that technology can work with nature to produce a more livable planet."
"A significant aspect of managing natural systems has to do with the paternalism of such projects ..."
"Can we and the world be saved from ourselves?"
"Such conciseness is welcome."
"Sure, reading Under a White Sky, one could wonder if Kolbert is implicitly bemoaning, say, the wheel, or anything emerging from the basic human impulse to control and shape our natural environment."
"This investigation of global change is brilliantly executed and urgently necessary."
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