Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

Elizabeth Kolbert

Feb 2021 · Sold by Crown

About this ebook

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.

Ratings and reviews

A slow and detailed read on environmental changes caused by humanity. The writing is dry and at some point in the book your eyes will become glazed over as you try, with futile effort, to finish the book. I, sadly, will only recommend this book to readers who are victim of insomnia.

Heard about it on an NPR interview and added it to my wishlist. Google had a price drop, so I bought it and started reading slowly. Humankind got settled after the end of the last ice age and since then they have terraformed and conquered the planet in many ways. From bringing their favorite plants across continents and wiping out native species, to gene-editing toads to not be poisonous (hopefully). Our period of climate stability is coming to an end and there are people working to preserve, but also to change and grow. Millions of species have already been lost, is it worth it to save what we have? Should we be taking carbon out of the air? Cut emissions? Put up particles in the air to reflect sunlight and cool at the same time? All three at once? History shows our past 6,000 years as the anomaly. Are we ready to put concrete dams in place to stop glaciers and protect New York from sea rise? Think about it after you read.

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.