Hardcover, 256 pages
English language
Published April 15, 2021 by Crown.
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.
Disappointing techno-utopian view that barely engages critically with the serious implications of the recursive logic of these capitalist interventions aimed at maintaining the status quo, and repackages defeatist responses as hopeful salvation.
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 …
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."
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.
This is probably one of my last updates on Goodreads. I'm headed over to StoryGraph, an independent, black-owned website that has quite a bit of promise and a really strong recommendation system. Feel free to follow my account over there as it continues to get updates:
https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/jansendotsh
As for this book:
There's an amount of insight into the changing of our environments in a way that points to larger-scale issues that are likely to impact our way of life sooner, rather than later. When we hear about climate change and the impending climate catastrophe, we often only think of temperatures rising and some sort of apocalyptic scenario in which we all burn to a crisp. I think this book provides an important amount of context to what's going on now in the world that is directly linked to these changes and how they're only going to be exacerbated without some …
This is probably one of my last updates on Goodreads. I'm headed over to StoryGraph, an independent, black-owned website that has quite a bit of promise and a really strong recommendation system. Feel free to follow my account over there as it continues to get updates:
https://app.thestorygraph.com/profile/jansendotsh
As for this book:
There's an amount of insight into the changing of our environments in a way that points to larger-scale issues that are likely to impact our way of life sooner, rather than later. When we hear about climate change and the impending climate catastrophe, we often only think of temperatures rising and some sort of apocalyptic scenario in which we all burn to a crisp. I think this book provides an important amount of context to what's going on now in the world that is directly linked to these changes and how they're only going to be exacerbated without some sort of immediate action. It's a great primer for folks who want to know why climate change and human intervention matters, with numerous visible examples along with responses that are being considered.
Elizabeth Kolbert meets with people who are trying who are undertaking extraordinary actions in order to fix problems caused by previous extraordinary and sometimes ridiculous actions. ‘A book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems,’ as she puts it.
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.
