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Critics' Opinion:
Readers' Opinion:
First Published:
Feb 2021, 256 pages
Paperback:
Apr 2022, 272 pages
Book Reviewed by:
Ian Muehlenhaus
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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?
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.
Chapter 1
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 ...
Kolbert's narrative is informed and informative, and she doesn't avoid questioning the potential ethical dilemmas posed by these new innovations. Admittedly, gene editing and turning the sky bright white with sulfates, reducing the amount of sunlight reaching the Earth by two percent, could have unforeseen repercussions. However, as she presents ever-mounting evidence that current approaches for "saving the environment" simply don't work — in fact, have never worked — and other solutions exist, it's difficult not to be swayed...continued
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(Reviewed by Ian Muehlenhaus).
Genetically modified organisms (GMOs) have received a bad rap. They're banned from being grown or used in food throughout most of Europe. They're caustically labeled on groceries in the United States. And they are frequently despised by foodies, farmers, environmentalists and the devoutly religious alike — for reasons ranging from health, to corporate greed, to technophobia, to ethics.
While there are valid arguments to be made against the use of GMOs, it's important to look at this issue from a balanced perspective. For some, anti-GMO sentiment is based more on anxiety than fact. For example, as Elizabeth Kolbert points out in Under a White Sky, GMO use may be the only way to save Australia from being overrun by toads!
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