Under A White Sky

 At just 201 pages and with helpful illustrations, [a:Elizabeth Kolbert|45840|Elizabeth Kolbert|https://images.gr-assets.com/authors/1380812913p2/45840.jpg]'s [b:Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future|54814834|Under a White Sky The Nature of the Future|Elizabeth Kolbert|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1608039192l/54814834.SY75.jpg|85515756] goes fast and is interesting throughout for most, though every time I see yet another article or chapter about the levees in New Orleans my brain kind of shuts down.
 Under a White Sky questions whether or not we should do anything to correct the damage we've done to our only possible habitat. (The idea of making Mars livable is rubbish.) We've transformed over half the ice-free parts of the planet and will keep dumping carbon dioxide into the air—where it remains for centuries—for at least several decades to come. Kolbert quotes Horace saying in 20 BCE, "Drive out nature though you will with a pitchfork, yet she will always hurry back, and before you know it, will break through your perverse disdain in triumph." It only that were still true.
 If you've given up on the idea of repairing the planet, which I nearly do at times, the passage excerpted below may make you think again, as it did me. That which can be done can be undone.
Excerpt:

 We got to talking about climate history and human history. In Steffesen's view, these amounted to more or less the same thing. "If you look at the output of ice cores, it has really changed the picture of the world, our view of past climates and of human evolution," he told me. "Why did human beings not make civilization fifty thousand years ago?
 "You know that they had just as big brains as we have today," he went on. "When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginnings of a culture, they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial—ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it's amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was very stable. I think that if the climate would have been stable fifty thousand years ago, it would have started then. But they had no chance."

“If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.”

Elizabeth Kolbert managed to create a detailed yet captivating book about climate change that doesn’t skimp out on the science nor leave the reader with generalizations. Most people are aware of the issues we face today, but they lack actionable ideas and a sense of what is directly impacted by human actions—not just a few decades from now, but in our present moment. Kolbert interviews scientists, engineers, entrepreneurs, and others in order to develop a picture of what is currently being done to combat climate change. The main thesis of this book is how humans are attempting to combat the consequences of our former interventions by… continuing to intervene, but hopefully in a more optimistic direction. At times, Kolbert questions the soundness of this logic, but at other times, seems to ask the reader whether there really is any alternative. After all, if this is our mess, we should be responsible for trying to fix it… because with or without intervention, nature cannot suddenly return to how it was before the Anthropocene.Kolbert focuses on several specific issues: invasive species in the Chicago River, the loss of land on Louisiana’s coastline, rejuvenating endangered species like the Devils Hole pupfish (which I first learned about from Caitlin Doughty), converting carbon emissions into rocks buried in the ground, genetically engineering new types of coral and their symbionts, and attempting to cool down the earth by shooting particles into the atmosphere (like what happened during the Year without a Summer). All of these are solutions caused by problems resulting from human actions, whether that be industrialization or causing mass extinctions of animal and plant fauna. Though these are all fairly specific incidents, Kolbert presents the information in an exciting and engaging way; she has a way of writing prose that doesn’t inundate the reader with facts or the results of the author’s research, but leads them to develop an interest in the material. Her voice doesn’t overwhelm the narrative, but merely presents the experts and the research in a transparent way, leaving the reader to feel as if they are the ones traveling to all of these exotic locations and hearing from the experts.While I wouldn’t say this is a good primer on climate change generally, it’s definitely an interesting look at the cutting edge of scientific inquiry into how we might actually combat climate change. Some of these solutions seem more likely than others, but all of them recognize that we have a problem that needs solving now, not decades from now. Unfortunately science and policymakers are hardly ever in agreement, so it remains to be seen how we’ll manage to achieve that… but it does give me hope that so many from various fields are working hard to come up with solutions in spite of that. I’m glad I picked this up as Kolbert has a great writing style and has made much of current developments accessible to the average reader.