Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

By Elizabeth Kolbert

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, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal • “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  

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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Crown
• Release date: Feb 9, 2021
• ISBN: 9780593136294

Elizabeth Kolbert

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. She has also been awarded two National Magazine Awards for her writing at The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1999, and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

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Praise for Under a White Sky

A fascinating survey of novel attempts to manage natural systems of all sizes, from preserving tiny populations of desert fish to altering the entire atmosphere…One of the great science journalists, Kolbert has for many years been an essential voice, a reporter from the front lines of the environmental crisis. Her new book crackles with the realities of living in an era that has sounded the death knell for our commonly held belief that one can meaningfully distinguish between nature and humanity…. [Kolbert] has a marvelous eye for the quirky…and she wields figurative language in truly glorious ways…. Time to work with what we have, using the knowledge we have, with our eyes fully open to the realities of where we are.

—

Helen Macdonald

, The New York Times Book Review

"Kolbert reveals the Anthropocene at its most absurd…. Under a White Sky expertly mixes travelogue, science reporting and explanatory journalism, all with the authority of a writer confident enough to acknowledge ambiguity."

—

Carlos Lozada

, The Washington Post

"[Under a White Sky] is 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

"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

Elizabeth Kolbert’s beat is examining the impact of humans on the environment and she does it better than basically everyone. [Kolbert] takes this damage as a starting point rather than a focus, asking how to reconstruct, preserve, and even save nature, going forward.

—Literary 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.

—

Amy Brady

, Gizmodo

This intimate natural history is both a sober assessment of the ecosystems we have harmed and an exciting description of some of the discoveries that could help undo that damage.

—Scientific American

Beautifully written…Elizabeth Kolbert is a top journalist.

—

Ken Caldeira

, Science

Kolbert has a keen awareness of unintended consequences, and she’s funny. If you like your apocalit with a side of humor, she will have you laughing while Rome burns.

—

Leah C. Stokes

, MIT Technology Review

Kolbert’s prose is peppered with…mordant observations, which bring out the humanity (or animality) in her subjects.

—

Ben Cooke

, The Times (U.K.)

A meticulously researched and deftly crafted work of journalism that explores some of the biggest challenges of our age.

—

Jonathan Watts

, The Guardian

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.

—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)

Urgent, absolutely necessary reading as a portrait of our devastated planet…Every paragraph of Kolbert’s books has a mountain of reading and reporting behind it.

—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)

By Elizabeth Kolbert

The Sixth Extinction

Field Notes from a Catastrophe

The Prophet of Love

Book Title, Under a White Sky, Subtitle, The Nature of the Future, Author, Elizabeth Kolbert, Imprint, Crown

Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Kolbert

Afterword copyright © 2022 by Elizabeth Kolbert

Maps and graphics © 2021 MGMT. Design

Excerpt from Life On a Little-Known Planet by Elizabeth Kolbert copyright © 2025 by Elizabeth Kolbert.

Penguin Random House values and supports copyright. Copyright fuels creativity, encourages diverse voices, promotes free speech, and creates a vibrant culture. Thank you for buying an authorized edition of this book and for complying with copyright laws by not reproducing, scanning, or distributing any part of it in any form without permission. You are supporting writers and allowing Penguin Random House to continue to publish books for every reader. Please note that no part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems.

All rights reserved.

Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.

Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

Originally published in hardcover in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, in 2021.

Portions of this work originally appeared in The New Yorker.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Kolbert, Elizabeth, author.

Title: Under a white sky / Elizabeth Kolbert.

Description: First edition. | New York: Crown, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2020047398 (print) | LCCN 2020047399 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593136287 | ISBN 9780593238776 | ISBN 9780593136294 (ebook)

Subjects: LCSH: Nature—Effect of human beings on. | Human ecology. | Environmental protection. | Ecological engineering. | Sustainability.

Classification: LCC GF75 .K65 2021 (print) | LCC GF75 (ebook) | DDC 304.2/8—dc23

LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020047398

LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/​2020047399

Ebook ISBN 9780593136294

crownpublishing.com

Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook

Cover design: Christopher Brand

ep_prh_6.9_153346133_c0_r1

Contents

Dedication

Epigraph

Down the River

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Into the Wild

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Up in the Air

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Afterword

Acknowledgments

Notes

Credits

Excerpt from Life On a Little-Known Planet

About the Author

_153346133_

To my boys

Sometimes he runs his hammer along the walls, as though to give the signal to the great waiting machinery of rescue to swing into operation. It will not happen exactly in this way—the rescue will begin in its own time, irrespective of the hammer—but it remains something, something palpable and graspable, a token, something one can kiss, as one cannot kiss rescue.

Franz Kafka

Down the River

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.

---

—

The United States Army Corps of Engineers has its Chicago District headquarters in a Classical Revival building on LaSalle Street. A plaque outside the building explains that it was the site of the General Time Convention of 1883, held to sync the country’s clocks. The process involved pruning dozens of regional time zones down to four, which, in many towns, resulted in what’s become known as the day with two noons.

Since its founding, under President Thomas Jefferson, the Corps has been dedicated to out-scaled interventions. Among the many world-altering undertakings it’s had a shovel in are: the Panama Canal, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Bonneville Dam, and the Manhattan Project. (To build the atomic bomb, the Corps created a new division; it called this the Manhattan District to disguise the project’s true purpose.) It is a sign of the times that the Corps finds itself increasingly involved in backward-looping, second-order efforts, like managing the electric barriers on the Sanitary and Ship Canal.

One morning not long after my boat trip with the Friends, I visited the Corps’ Chicago office to talk with the engineer in charge of the barriers, Chuck Shea. The first thing I noticed on arriving was a pair of giant Asian carp, mounted on rocks, next to the reception desk. Like all Asian carp, they had eyes near the bottom of their heads, so it looked as if they’d been mounted upside down. In a curious commingling of fake fauna, the plastic fish were surrounded by little plastic butterflies.

I never would have pictured when I was studying engineering years ago that I would spend so much time thinking about a fish, Shea told me. But, actually, it’s pretty good for party conversation. Shea is a slight man with graying hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and the diffidence that comes from dealing with problems words can’t solve. I asked him how the barriers worked, and he stuck out his hand, as if to shake mine.

We pulse electricity into the waterway, he explained. "And basically you just have to transmit enough electricity to the water to ensure that you’re getting an electrical field throughout the area.

The electric-field strength is increasing as you move from upstream to downstream or vice versa, so if my hand were a fish, its nose is here, he continued, indicating the tip of his middle finger, and its tail is here. He pointed to the base of his palm, then set the outstretched hand wiggling.

"What happens is, the fish is swimming in, and its nose is experiencing one electrical voltage, and its tail is experiencing another. That’s what makes the current actually flow through the body. It’s the current flowing through a fish that will shock them or electrocute them. So a big fish has a big voltage difference from its nose to its tail. A smaller fish doesn’t have that much distance for the voltage to cover,

Reviews for Under a White Sky

[gwendydd · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is an interesting examination of some human-caused ecological problems, and how humans have tried to solve those problems, usually making them worse. She looks at ideas scientists are currently considering for how to solve our current climate problems, and the potential problems they present. All in all, this book is not particularly optimistic, although it does show how ingenious (if misguided) humans can be in trying to solve human-made problems.

[a.godhelm · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

A short book that feels half finished. The worst penchants of the author are more grating here than in the last book, namely the incessant dropping of references to poems, music, literature. We get it, you write for the New Yorker. Some chapters read more like a travel blog than reporting on these projects. It speeds up toward the end, with Covid seemingly impacting the book's production schedule and it all just sort of ends on a sour note of defeatism.

Still, about half of the book is worthwhile and goes into some detail about the various climate management solutions that try to combat climate change, from carbon capture to solar radiation management to genetic hardening and manipulation.

[markm2315 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

The author is a well-known environmental journalist and staff writer for the New Yorker. In this book, she travels to and interviews assorted scientists and entrepreneurs who are looking for ways to remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, make the stratosphere more opaque, alkalinize the ocean, etc. in various desperate seeming, but perhaps ultimately necessary, ways. She doesn't pull any punches and you probably shouldn't read this if you’re feeling down. Her work on the book was apparently interrupted by the pandemic and it was shorter than I expected it to be.

[kalliegrace · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Some great looks at different ways humans have changed our planet/environment and what we're doing to change it back/mitigate the damage. I wished this had been longer, but the topics covered are covered sufficiently. Invasive species, disappearing land, carbon emissions, any change we make to our environment sets off a cascade of other changes we can't always predict.

[steve02476 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A brief book about (in Kolbert’s words) “people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Kolbert is worried about the planet, but she’s not a finger-wagger, and she knows there are no simple solutions to these problem. She has a good sense of humor and humility and she’s a great writer, lots of the book is just plain fun to read, although in the background there is a lot of sadness for what the world has lost and what more we continue to lose. But there’s also admiration for people struggling to understand what is going wrong and to try to develop methods to help.

[castlelass · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Elizabeth Kolbert takes readers on a journey around the world in search of the latest scientific thinking with regard to reversing the damage done to the planet by humankind. Climate change is only one of the areas of focus. She also covers invasive species and other interventions that may have been intended to help, but have actually hurt, the environment and must now be contained, or reversed, if possible.

It reads as a collection of essays. I was particularly interested in the method of extracting carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and injecting it underground where pressure turns it into calcium carbonate. The section on solar geoengineering is excellent. The pandemic seems to have halted Kolbert’s travels just as the she was getting into an in-depth analysis of cores taken in the Greenland ice sheet. Other topics include Asian carp in Illinois’ waters, desert fish in Nevada, flooding in the Mississippi Delta, genetic engineering using CRISPR, invasive cane toads in Australia, and the decline of coral reefs.

I had previously read and very much enjoyed Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction. This book takes a similar approach, shedding light on some of our global issues and what is being done to address them. There is some optimism to be found here; however, it will require people working together and agreeing on solutions, and as the author points out, we do not have a great track record. I found it informative and relevant.

[ragwaine · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Listened to this on a long road trip. Kolbert is an entertaining writer and I love that this book covered many topics, all linked by upcoming and past environmental events that have either caused damage or will cause damage if we don't do anything about them. She talks with many scientists who are coming up with solutions and then talks about the possible side-effects of those solutions. She talks about the flooding situation in New Orleans, a species of fish that only lives in a single cave, global warming, and a number of other topics.

So if you're into environmental science, but don't want a very detailed book on a single subject, this book is for you. For me it was perfect, I got to learn a little bit about a lot of things. I don't need to become an expert on a single invasive species, I wouldn't use that information, but it's nice to know about a bunch of things that are going on around the world. If nothing else they're good conversation starters.

[nmele_4 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Kolbert takes a look at the ways humans are trying to mitigate or reverse the effects of human meddling with the world we live in. She reports on changes in the water, the earth and the sky, and more than once the changes and the efforts t reverse or mitigate those changes involve two or all three elements of our world. Kolbert often refrains from making the obvious comments, respecting her readers' ability to reason from the facts she presents, which makes this a good book for absorbing unpleasant truths. Fittingly, her work on the book was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, so the book ends somewhat abruptly but pointedly.

[japaul22 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kolbert is an excellent writer about environmental issues. As Kolbert states in her summary, "this has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems." The essays explore the situation with Asian carp in the Mississippi (something I read about in more detail in [Life and Death of the Great Lakes]), the efforts to stop New Orleans from sinking, the pupfish of Devil's Hole, cane toads and genetic engineering, and efforts to trap CO2 and stop or slow global warming, among others.

This book is readable, if worrying, and a good survey of different attempts being made currently to control/help/restore/fix the environmental mess we've made. It fit very well with my reading this year and gives a mention to the subject of my next book, [The Code Breaker: Jennifer Doudna, Gene Editing, and the Future of the Human Race]. It is not as good as Kolbert's previous book, [The Sixth Extinction], which I remember as being much more in depth and scholarly. This is closer to essays or nature writing - still good, but not as thorough as I prefer.

[rivkat_2 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kolbert explores aspects of what the natural world will look like as we enter fully into the anthropocene. You know about carbon, but did you know that human fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than the rest of the terrestrial ecosystem, or that we routinely cause earthquakes? People outweigh wild animals by eight to one, and it’s 22 to one if you add in domestic animals. The consequences of our changes are well underway. Louisiana has shrunk by over 2000 square miles since the 1930s, more than Delaware or Rhode Island. Debates over gene editing now must include that the alternative for animals is likely extinction, as well as that our previous attempts at moving genomes around the world in animals or plants have often been disastrous. She talks to a researcher who thinks we need to think about carbon dioxide like sewage: we understand that it wouldn’t help to punish people if they went to the bathroom too often, but we also don’t let them shit on the sidewalk. So she also talks to people who propose geoengineering mitigation solutions, though she characterizes at least some as being like “treating a heroin habit with amphetamines.” But most of her interviewees say some version of: geoengineering is like chemotherapy; you don’t use it because you have better options. One says: “We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it.” But only might be.

[stbalbach_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Kolbert says it is much easier to destroy an ecosystem then maintain one. She shows specific attempts to manage nature even for the smallest of things, like keeping a few dozen minnow-size pupfish alive. It is discouraging. Our ability to destroy nature knows no bounds, while the record of management is fishy. Which explains the predicament of a world in decline, at the scale of a pupfish, and global warming.

[beamis12 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Not a direct quote, but it is stated that this is a book about solving the problems created by those trying to solve problems. Problems we humans have caused either through tampering with nature or our lack of caring enough to take care of what we have been given in our natural world. From the Asian carp to the tiny pup fish in Nevada, from the coral in the barrier reefs which is dying due to the warming of the oceans, to the huge frogs imported to the Caribbean, which have now spread to Australia. Looking at the long range effects of our climate change in many different areas, and what is being done to combat this devastation.

Carbon exchangers, assisted evolution, Crisper and its gene editing, man made habitats to replace those that have been lost, attempts to grow hardier coral hoping to replace what has died. This book takes one on a journey to see what is being done by various scientists, engineers, hoping to stave off further damage.

Interesting and informative though I did see a few PBS specials in some of the areas discussed. Others were eye opening. It is such a shame that climate change, like Covid has become politicized. No one wins when this happens.

ARC from edelweiss.

[bobvtreader · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

There are a few problems with this book that arises from the scope of the book; I would have been happier if the author was a little more focused and went into more detail about each topic.

So what am I talking about? This is a collection of short pieces that, as a collective, is man's attempt to mitigate climate change. From the book we get a snap shot of the magnitude of the problem. Each section looks at a small piece of the problems and how er try to remediate the situation. While not as much detail as I would have liked the author has an extensive notes section that one could explore.

Finally the author is not very optimistic about the future. Mankind my survive the global warming incident; however it will be a greatly changed world and possibly we have reached our technology apex. We can point fingers at who is responsible for our problems; however we started down this path in the 18th century and we are digging a deeper hole each day.

[msf59 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

“Yes, people have fundamentally altered the atmosphere. And, yes, this is likely to lead to all sorts of dreadful consequences. But people are ingenious. They come up with crazy, big ideas, and sometimes these actually work.”

Kolbert burst onto the scene with the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sixth Extinction. A book I enjoyed immensely. She has returned here with a collection of eight essays, exploring the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world and how scientists and biologists are fighting back. These very inventive measures may only slow the bleeding but it is at least a start. Kolbert traveled the world for these stories and did not mind getting her hands dirty along the way. It must be tough to be a science writer in 2021 but she has pulled it off once again, with this eye-opener.