Under a White Sky

📘 About This Book

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, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews • “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 With a new afterword by the author 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.

📖 Summary

Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert is a profound and unsettling exploration of humanity's transformative and often compounding impact on the natural world. Building upon her previous Pulitzer Prize-winning work, Kolbert shifts her focus from simply documenting ecological destruction to examining the next phase of human intervention: intervention to save what we have already broken. The book takes readers on a global journey to meet scientists, engineers, and conservationists who are attempting radical technological fixes to manage the consequences of previous environmental damage. From the Chicago River, where electric barriers desperately try to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, to the deserts of Nevada, where rare pupfish are kept alive in artificial concrete environments, Kolbert illustrates how human dominance over nature has created a cascade of unintended consequences. We are now living in a world where intervention has become the only way forward, forcing us to ask whether we can modify nature once again, this time to rescue it from ourselves. Kolbert investigates geoengineering concepts, such as artificially whitening the sky to reflect sunlight and combat global warming, along with efforts to genetically engineer coral reefs that can survive in increasingly acidic and warm oceans. Throughout these vignettes, the author maintains a clear-eyed, skeptical, yet deeply curious tone. She avoids offering easy answers or comforting utopian visions. Instead, she presents a complex reality where our technological ingenuity is both the poison and the proposed antidote. The narrative confronts readers with the paradox of the Anthropocene era, a time when withdrawing human influence is no longer an option, leaving us to navigate a managed planet. Kolbert challenges our traditional notions of wilderness and pristine nature, urging us to think radically about how we manage our environment as we plunge deeper into a future shaped by human control. The book is a vital contribution to contemporary science writing, recommended widely by thinkers, leaders, and critics alike for its urgent message and exquisite prose.

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