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.
It's not the most cohesive book. It reads like a collection of essays that forms a snapshot of where we are at the moment as we struggle to understand the ramifications of our previous attempts to correct nature but also, with climate change looming over us, face the undeniable necessity that we form new plans to make yet more attempts to avert global disaster. The people we meet and the plans they have are all fascinating, but the real strength of the book is the refusal to either condemn or champion anything. Kolbert remains a skeptic not only about whether we still have a chance to correct anything in terms of extinction or climate change, but also whether we have the right to continue meddling when we've only managed to make things worse with our efforts.
“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 …
“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.
