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Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future Kindle Edition
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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.
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherCrown
- Publication dateFebruary 9, 2021
- File size70724 KB
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Editorial Reviews
Review
“To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth, you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert. . . . It’s 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
“A superb and honest reflection of our extraordinary time.”—Nature
“[Under a White Sky] exhibits Kolbert’s sculptor-like skill for making climate change feel tangible, happening before our eyes and beneath our fingers.”—Wired
“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
“Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert’s beat is examining the impact of humans on the environment and she does it better than basically everyone.”—Lit 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.”—Gizmodo
“If you like your apocalit with a side of humor, she will have you laughing while Rome burns.”—MIT Technology Review
“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)
“Every paragraph of Kolbert’s books has a mountain of reading and reporting behind it . . . Urgent, absolutely necessary reading as a portrait of our devastated planet.”—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)
About the Author
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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.
Product details
- ASIN : B08DMWR6BP
- Publisher : Crown (February 9, 2021)
- Publication date : February 9, 2021
- Language : English
- File size : 70724 KB
- Text-to-Speech : Enabled
- Screen Reader : Supported
- Enhanced typesetting : Enabled
- X-Ray : Enabled
- Word Wise : Enabled
- Sticky notes : On Kindle Scribe
- Print length : 258 pages
- Best Sellers Rank: #42,648 in Kindle Store (See Top 100 in Kindle Store)
- #4 in Environmental Science (Kindle Store)
- #10 in Conservation
- #34 in Nature Conservation
- Customer Reviews:
About the author
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker. She is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
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In 2015 Elizabeth Kolbert won the Pulitzer Prize for her book the Sixth Extinction. In my review of that book, I wrote: Kolbert is not a scientist but a reporter and writer for The New Yorker magazine and as such her book is structured as a series of bylines as she travels around the world reporting on scientists investigating extinctions in both the present and the past. As in that book she adopts the same format but this time investigating “how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation”.
Ice cores from the Antarctic and Greenland have shown that the last 10,000 years of earths history have been the most benign and stable climatological periods in the last 100,000 years. During this time, we have been able to develop agriculture, an amazing technological and a pervasive globe encompassing culture with a population now of almost 8 billion people. Without this unusually stable climate most of our current civilization would probably have not evolved or been possible. Up to this point we humans have taken this for granted thinking that this benign state will somehow last forever. In Kolbert’s last book she emphasized that due to our own rapacious destruction of earth’s ecosystems and our destabilization of climate stability, this situation is coming to an end and not responding is not an option.
Facing an unimaginable crisis of our own making how should we respond? When we intervene, are we smart enough not to cause newer unanticipated problems greater than the original problem we sought to solve? Kolbert travels around the world seeking an answer to this question. She visits places and examples where we historically have tried to solve problems such as sewage in Chicago or taming floods on the Mississippi only to create larger problems such as invasive species or sinking cities such as New Orleans.
The most interesting part of her book is when she addresses the people and places that are using current cutting-edge technology to save ecosystems and reverse global warming. One such example is on the Great Barrier Reef of Australia, one of the most diverse and prolific ecosystems on earth, which is under dire threat from oceanic warming and acidification. Faced with the real possibility of extinction of the reef in just decades, scientists are turning to genetic modification of Corals to make them more resistant to these fast-changing conditions.
Since 2012 a new gene editing technology called CRISPR-Cas has become ubiquitous. In fact, so ubiquitous that you can buy your own “genetic engineering home lab kit” from a company in California called Odin for $1800. Kolbert buys her own kit and is able to engineer a colony of E. coli bacteria into a strain that is resistant to streptomycin antibiotic. She then inserts a jellyfish gene into yeast which then glows in the dark. Sound dangerous? Yes, what could possibly go wrong, but this is also the technology to develop new global warming resistant corals or destroy malaria carrying mosquitos, control rapacious rodents on Pacific Islands or control a plague of Cane Toads in Australia, not to mention breakthrough medical benefits. We have so altered natural systems with invasive species, with climatological chaos that the only solution is further intervention. She quotes a scientist at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory: “What people are not seeing is that this is already a genetically altered environment. Invasive species alter the environment by adding entire genomes that don’t belong. By contrast Genetic engineers, by contrast, alter just a few bits of DNA here and there”. “The classic thing people say with molecular biology is: Are you playing God? Well no. We are using our understanding of biological processes to see if we can benefit a system that is in trauma”.
Do you feel guilty about all the carbon you are emitting into the atmosphere when you drive around in your SUV or eat a filet mignon? Now there is a way to assuage your guilt. There is a now a company called Climeworks that will do just that for the price of $1000 per ton of sequestered CO2. Being that each American emits about 20 tons per year following the American way of life and to totally assuage your guilt will cost you a cool $20,000 per year. Do you feel that guilty? Kolbert purchases one ton of sequestration and then visits the place where the deed is done which turns out to be at a geothermal power plant in Iceland. There they inject CO2 into the hot molten basalt at the bottom of their well to form limestone. This is a way the earth has been doing this process for millions of years without payment. In fact, it is the very process that transpired when the Himalayas were pushed up by the Indian subcontinent million of years ago, sequestered billions of tons of carbon into limestone and enabled the ice ages to begin 3 million years ago. Is this process a feasible solution to our current crisis? According to the latest UN climate report at this point, some form of sequestration is almost certainly required to avoid a catastrophic global temperature rise above 2 degrees regardless of what green technologies are introduced. Almost certainly the cost of that sequestration will have to be drastically reduced.
Is there another way to approach the problem? Here Kolbert interviews scientists who are studying a process called solar geoengineering which involves shooting reflective compounds or crystals into the stratosphere to reflect sun light and reduce the earths albedo or heat absorption. This the same process that occurs when large volcanic explosions expel billions of tons of dust and S02 that block incoming sunlight and cool the planet. Last time a truly global volcanic eruption occurred was Tambora in Indonesia in 1815 and caused catastrophic cooling causing mass famine in various places around the world. Is this a feasible solution? Maybe, certainly not to the extent of Tambora and one side effect might be changing the sky from blue to white and hence the title of the book. Sunsets might be improved however.
This a short book and quick read and one gets the sense that it was somewhat truncated because of the pandemic restricting travel. However, there is still a lot of interesting information about the future fate of our planet and what can be done to ameliorate the damage that we have inflicted. JACK
That there are brilliant minds working innovatively to solve these problems inspires optimism. But these sobering portraits really highlight the extreme human measures it takes to keep at bay the problems caused by humans interfering with nature in the first place. We've already transformed the planet; how much more will it be transformed by these interventions, and in what ways?
Elizabeth Kolbert’s claim to fame is her book The Sixth Extinction. In comparison Kolbert’s under A White Sky is rather short and disorganized, yet her coverage of those working on solutions to Climate Change is pretty darn interesting. In her conclusion, she writes, “This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Putting this sentence at the book’s beginning rather than buried at its end would have provided a reader a compass to help determine where Kolbert was going with her dialogue.
As she wades through the reversed direction of the Chicago river; Asian carp; Cane toads; forced and accelerated evolution in regard to coral, in particular in regard to the Great Barrier Reef (without discussing the importance of the worlds reefs; the continual flooding of New Orleans both despite and because of the actions of The Army Corps of engineers, one begins to ponder a general connection that might exist, while the book itself is headed toward a two star rating.
Then, Kolbert got to Global Warming and Climate science. The book’s last sixty pages are worth the complete price of admission. The chapter begins with carbon sequestration, the pros and cons of how it can be done, and does it also contribute to the growing problem. The stoppered bathtub” analogy is perhaps the best analogy I’ve heard in regard to the anthropocentric carbon dioxide problem on the Earth. The tub is full of water/ the sky’s CO2 level; the tubs stoppered, so the water isn’t going anywhere, and the atmosphere’s increased CO2 level won’t drop in the near future either; and even if the water flow to the tub is reduced, it will still accumulate until over flowing, as will reduced emissions continue to amass in the atmosphere. In a sense, we are already beyond the tipping point in terms of global temperature increase.
Harvard University Center for the Environment director Dan Schrag says, “I’m a scientist. My job is not to tell people the good news. My job is to describe the world as accurately as possible.” He predicts, due to the fact that the oceans must equilibriate. “If we were to stop CO2 emissions tomorrow, which of course isn’t possible, it’s still going to warm for centuries. That’s just basic physics.” Thus enters the topic of geoengineering, and the connection with people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems truly comes into focus. Kolbert , in a rather clandestine way connects the dots of her past “local problems”, but now the problem fix, if it doesn’t work could create problems beyond solving.
She hits the nail on the head with this. Humans have been around 35-50 thousand years, but only the last ten thousand or so have they thrived, largely due to agriculture and differentiation of what one can do because of agriculture. But ag has only been able to thrive because of the rather consistent global weather of the past ten thousand years, due to glacial retreat. This has been presented in great detail by Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs, and Steel. The CO2 we’ve put into the atmosphere isn’t going anywhere, as we continue to pour more into the mix. Her interviews with climate scientists do not bode well for our species, as everything they think of to combat the CO2 conundrum brings more as the bathtub continues to fill. One could say humans have become victims of their own success as a species.
Ultimately, one gets the feeling from Kolbert and her interviews, that the enormous fluctuations in the Earth’s climate over geological time, and those yet to come, render whatever we do as humans as a moot point. The Earth will shake is off as a dog rids itself of fleas. She also brings to the argument, when the blank really hits the fan, as it will despite, or because of any preventative efforts by man, the resulting population displacements will be staggering.
A sobering, informative book as we, as a species, dance on the razor’s edge.
Top reviews from other countries
On va génétiquement modifié des plantes pour corriger les erreurs commises par nos modifications génétiques. Bien écrit, mais terriblement déprimant de voir tous ces gens intelligents incapables de voir la vérité.