Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Overview

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • 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?

RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES • SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews • “Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”—Helen Macdonald, The New York Times  

With a new afterword by the author

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. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to 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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780593136294
Publisher:	Crown Publishing Group
Publication date:	02/09/2021
Sold by:	Random House
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
Sales rank:	101,021
File size:	68 MB
Note:	This product may take a few minutes to download.

About the Author

Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. For her work at The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Read an Excerpt

Chapter 1

Rivers make good metaphors—too good, perhaps. They can be murky and charged with hidden meaning, like the Mississippi, which to Twain represented “the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter.” Alternatively, they can be bright and clear and mirror-like. Thoreau set off for a week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and within a day found himself lost in reflection over the reflections he saw playing on the water. Rivers can signify destiny, or coming into knowledge, or coming upon that which one would rather not know. “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth,” Conrad’s Marlow recalls. They can stand for time, for change, and for life itself. “You can’t step into the same river twice,” Heraclitus is supposed to have said, to which one of his followers, Cratylus, is supposed to have replied, “You can’t step into the same river even once.”

It is a bright morning following several days of rain, and the not-quite-river I am riding is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The canal is a hundred and sixty feet wide and runs as straight as a ruler. Its waters, the shade of old cardboard, are flecked with candy wrappers and bits of Styrofoam. On this particular morning, traffic consists of barges hauling sand, gravel, and petrochemicals. The one exception is the vessel I’m on, a pleasure craft named City Living.

City Living is outfitted with off-white banquettes and a canvas awning that snaps smartly in the breeze. Also on board are the boat’s captain and owner and several members of a group called Friends of the Chicago River. The Friends are not a fastidious bunch. Often their outings involve wading knee-deep in polluted water to test for fecal coliform. Still, our expedition is slated to take us farther down the canal than any of them has ever been before. Everyone is excited and, if truth be told, also a little creeped out.

We have made our way into the canal from Lake Michigan, via the Chicago River’s South Branch, and now are motoring west, past mountains of road salt, mesas of scrap metal, moraines of rusted shipping containers. Just beyond the city limits, we skirt the outflow pipes of the Stickney plant, said to be the largest sewage operation in the world. From the deck of City Living, we can’t see the Stickney, but we can smell it. Conversation turns to the recent rains. These have overwhelmed the region’s water-treatment system, resulting in “combined sewer overflows,” or CSOs. There is speculation about what sort of “floatables” the CSOs have set adrift. Someone wonders if we’ll encounter any Chicago River whitefish, local slang for used condoms. We chug on. Eventually, the Sanitary and Ship Canal joins up with another canal, known as the Cal-Sag. At the meeting of the waters, there’s a V-shaped park, featuring picturesque waterfalls. Like just about everything else on our route, the waterfalls are manufactured.

If Chicago is the City of the Big Shoulders, the Sanitary and Ship Canal might be thought of as its Oversized Sphincter. Before it was dug, all of the city’s waste—the human excrement, the cow manure, the sheep dung, the rotting viscera from the stockyards—ran into the Chicago River, which, in some spots, was so thick with filth it was said a chicken could walk from one bank to the other without getting her feet wet. From the river, the muck flowed into Lake Michigan. The lake was—and remains—the city’s sole source of drinking water. Typhoid and cholera outbreaks were routine.

The canal, which was planned in the closing years of the nineteenth century and opened at the start of the twentieth, flipped the river on its head. It compelled the Chicago to change its direction, so that instead of draining into Lake Michigan, the city’s ordure would flow away from it, into the Des Plaines River, and from there into the Illinois, the Mississippi, and, ultimately, the Gulf of Mexico. water in chicago river now resembles liquid, ran the headline in The New York Times.

The reversal of the Chicago was the biggest public-works project of its time, a textbook example of what used to be called, without irony, the control of nature. Excavating the canal took seven years and entailed the invention of a whole new suite of technologies—the Mason & Hoover Conveyor, the Heidenreich Incline—which, together, became known as the Chicago School of Earth Moving. In total, forty-three million cubic yards of rock and soil were gouged out, enough, one admiring commentator calculated, to build an island more than fifty feet high and a mile square. The river made the city, and the city remade the river.

But reversing the Chicago didn’t just flush waste toward St. Louis. It also upended the hydrology of roughly two-thirds of the United States. This had ecological consequences, which had financial consequences, which, in turn, forced a whole new round of interventions on the backward-flowing river. It is toward these that City Living is cruising. We’re approaching cautiously, though maybe not cautiously enough, because at one point City Living almost gets squished between two double-wide barges. The deckhands yell down instructions that are initially incomprehensible, then become unprintable.

About thirty miles up the down river—or is it down the up river?—we draw near our goal. The first sign that we’re getting close is a sign. It’s the size of a billboard and the color of a plastic lemon. warning, it says. no swimming, diving, fishing, or mooring. Almost immediately there’s another sign, in white: supervise all passengers, children, and pets. Several hundred yards farther along, a third sign appears, maraschino red. danger, it states. entering electric fish barriers. high risk of electric shock.

Everyone pulls out a cell phone or a camera. We photograph the water, the warning signs, and each other. There’s joking on board that one of us should dive into the river electric, or at least stick a hand in to see what happens. Six great blue herons, hoping for an easy dinner, have gathered, wing to wing, on the bank, like students waiting on line in a cafeteria. We photograph them, too.

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. Choose just about any metric you want and it tells the same story. People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains. We have dammed or diverted most of the world’s major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do. We now routinely cause earthquakes. (A particularly damaging human-induced quake that shook Pawnee, Oklahoma, on the morning of September 3, 2016, was felt all the way in Des Moines.) In terms of sheer biomass, the numbers are stark-staring: today people outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of more than eight to one. Add in the weight of our domesticated animals—mostly cows and pigs—and that ratio climbs to twenty-two to one. “In fact,” as a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences observed, “humans and livestock outweigh all vertebrates combined, with the exception of fish.” We have become the major driver of extinction and also, probably, of speciation. So pervasive is man’s impact, it is said that we live in a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene. In the age of man, there is nowhere to go, and this includes the deepest trenches of the oceans and the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet, that does not already bear our Friday-like footprints.

An obvious lesson to draw from this turn of events is: be careful what you wish for. Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago. Humans are producing no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future. At this point it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us—as of this writing nearly eight billion—and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable.

And so we face a no-analog predicament. If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control. Only now what’s got to be managed is not a nature that exists—or is imagined to exist—apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself—not so much the control of nature as the control of the control of nature. First you reverse a river. Then you electrify it.

Table of Contents

Down the River 1

Into the Wild 61

Up in the Air 141

Afterword 203

Acknowledgments 209

Notes 213

Credits 241

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/14/2020

Pulitzer-winner Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction) focuses once again on the Anthropocene in this illuminating study of humans’ “control of nature.” Humans have already changed the natural world, she writes, and now are innovating to counter the fallout. As she surveys climate-related discoveries, Kolbert describes barriers erected to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes after the carp were brought to America in 1963 to “keep aquatic weeds in check.” She also tells of the divers who conduct a yearly “census” on the Devil’s Hole pupfish, a threatened species surviving in a single pond in the Mojave Desert. Kolbert notes the irony and ingenuity of humans battling natural processes to which they have contributed: the dams and levees along the Mississippi River, for instance, were “built to keep southern Louisiana dry” but have caused a massive “land-loss crisis” due to flooding elsewhere in the state. Along the way, Kolbert covers interventions on the cutting edge of science, such as “assisted evolution,” which would help coral reefs endure warmer oceans. Her style of immersive journalism (which involves being hit by a jumping carp, observing coral sex, and watching as millennia-old ice is pulled from the ice sheets of Greenland) makes apparent the challenges of “the whole-earth transformation” currently underway. This investigation of global change is brilliantly executed and urgently necessary. Agent: Kathy Robbins, the Robbins Office. (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

Riveting . . . Under a White Sky expertly mixes travelogue, science reporting and explanatory journalism.”—The Washington Post

“To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth, you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert. . . . It’s a tribute to Kolbert’s skills as a storyteller that she transforms the quest to deal with the climate crisis into a darkly comic tale of human hubris and imagination that could either end in flames or in a new vision of Paradise.”—Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone

“A superb and honest reflection of our extraordinary time.”—Nature

“[Under a White Sky] exhibits Kolbert’s sculptor-like skill for making climate change feel tangible, happening before our eyes and beneath our fingers.”—Wired

“What makes Under A White Sky so valuable and such a compelling read is Kolbert tells by showing. Without beating the reader over the head, she makes it clear how far we already are from a world of undisturbed, perfectly balanced nature—and how far we must still go to find a new balance for the planet’s future that still has us humans in it.”—NPR
 
“From the Mojave to lava fields in Iceland, Kolbert takes readers on a globe-spanning journey to explore these projects while weighing their pros, cons, and ethical implications.”—The Nation

“Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert’s beat is examining the impact of humans on the environment and she does it better than basically everyone.”—Lit Hub
 
“An eye-opening—and at times terrifying—examination of just how far scientists have already gone in their attempts to re-engineer the planet.”—Gizmodo

“If you like your apocalit with a side of humor, she will have you laughing while Rome burns.”—MIT Technology Review

“Brilliantly executed and urgently necessary.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“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.’”—Booklist (starred review)

“Every paragraph of Kolbert’s books has a mountain of reading and reporting behind it . . . Urgent, absolutely necessary reading as a portrait of our devastated planet.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“A tale not of magic-bullet remedies where maybe this time things will be different when we intervene in nature, but rather of deploying a panoply of strategies big and small in hopes that there is still time to make a difference and atone for our past. A sobering and realistic look at humankind’s perhaps misplaced faith that technology can work with nature to produce a more livable planet.”—Library Journal (starred review)

From the Publisher

"Narrator Rebecca Lowman is an excellent choice for Kolbert's report on the future of our environment. Lowman narrates clearly, enunciates precisely, and provides a sense of immediacy while bringing energy and intelligence to the task. The work looks at the sinking of New Orleans, carbon capture in Iceland, invasive carp on the Mississippi River, geo-engineering, and more. Kolbert, a Pulitzer prize winner, is both an engaged writer and a thoughtful witness to the daunting challenges ahead. She is also a fine storyteller. The existential challenges of the heating of the planet and the often quirky fixes that are being proposed—from using nano-diamond aerosols in the sky to planting billions of trees—are scrutinized and weighed. Science writing has never been more important, and Kolbert's audiobook deserves a wide audience."

AudioFile Magazine Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award

★ 02/01/2021

Kolbert, author of the best-selling The Sixth Extinction, invites us to explore the question of whether technological solutions are the only answers left to rectify human-generated environmental problems. Using several case studies, she illustrates how humankind has had to deal with environmental repercussions whenever it seeks to control nature, and how the first instinct is to apply more or different technology, which often exacerbates the problem. But simply removing or reversing the original "solution" may be too little, too late as the rate of the environmental impact accelerates past the capacity of nature to recalibrate itself. Whether it is invasions of exotic species, levee-induced erosion, climate-induced extinctions, or anthropogenic climate change, Kolbert investigates current efforts at mitigation not with optimistic boosterism, but with a resigned and questioning fatalism. It is a tale not of magic-bullet remedies where maybe this time things will be different when we intervene in nature, but rather of deploying a panoply of strategies big and small in hopes that there is still time to make a difference and atone for our past. VERDICT A sobering and realistic look at humankind's perhaps misplaced faith that technology can work with nature to produce a more livable planet. Similiar to her previous book, Kolbert's latest offers engaging popular science. —Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Library Journal

Narrator Rebecca Lowman is an excellent choice for Kolbert’s report on the future of our environment. Lowman narrates clearly, enunciates precisely, and provides a sense of immediacy while bringing energy and intelligence to the task. The work looks at the sinking of New Orleans, carbon capture in Iceland, invasive carp on the Mississippi River, geo-engineering, and more. Kolbert, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is both an engaged writer and a thoughtful witness to the daunting challenges ahead. She is also a fine storyteller. The existential challenges of the heating of the planet and the often quirky fixes that are being proposed—from using nano-diamond aerosols in the sky to planting billions of trees—are scrutinized and weighed. Science writing has never been more important, and Kolbert’s audiobook deserves a wide audience. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2021 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2021 - AudioFile

Narrator Rebecca Lowman is an excellent choice for Kolbert’s report on the future of our environment. Lowman narrates clearly, enunciates precisely, and provides a sense of immediacy while bringing energy and intelligence to the task. The work looks at the sinking of New Orleans, carbon capture in Iceland, invasive carp on the Mississippi River, geo-engineering, and more. Kolbert, a Pulitzer Prize winner, is both an engaged writer and a thoughtful witness to the daunting challenges ahead. She is also a fine storyteller. The existential challenges of the heating of the planet and the often quirky fixes that are being proposed—from using nano-diamond aerosols in the sky to planting billions of trees—are scrutinized and weighed. Science writing has never been more important, and Kolbert’s audiobook deserves a wide audience. A.D.M. Winner of AudioFile Earphones Award, 2021 Best Audiobook © AudioFile 2021, Portland, Maine

FEBRUARY 2021 - AudioFile

★ 2020-12-22
More top-notch environmental reportage from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction.

In the manner of fellow New Yorker contributor John McPhee, every paragraph of Kolbert’s books has a mountain of reading and reporting behind it. In her latest, the author opens with a consideration of America’s most important waterways, the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, which meet near Chicago but “are—or were—distinct aquatic worlds.” We learn the reason for the past tense via Kolbert’s sharp account of the overweening engineering project that reversed the flow of Chicago’s wastewaters to send them not into the lakes but into the river. This created an artificial channel that has allowed invasive species from the south, such as Asian carp, into the lakes and creatures such as the zebra mussel from the lakes into the river. Things are no better down south in New Orleans, where the author finds a Mississippi Delta inundated by rising seas. “If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory,” she writes, “America would have only forty-nine states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land.” All of these processes feed neatly into Kolbert’s overarching theme of human-caused disasters. Her travels are wide and often challenging, as when she visited remote waterholes in the Mojave Desert to examine isolated populations of pupfish or when she interviewed ornithologists and entomologists to better understand the staggering decline in avian and insect species. “Even among insects, a class long thought to be extinction-resistant, numbers are plunging,” she writes, a process that extends across ecosystems everywhere. Especially vulnerable are coral reefs, which Kolbert examines in meticulous, exquisite detail. Can we and the world be saved from ourselves? That’s an up-in-the-air question, but the author holds out hope in a program that makes use of geoengineering, which, though highly speculative, is something that must be considered.

Urgent, absolutely necessary reading as a portrait of our devastated planet.

Kirkus Reviews