Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book on scientific responses to environmental crises is in many ways even more frightening than her last, as difficult as that is to fathom. Whereas The New Yorker writer’s Pulitzer Prize–winning 2014 tome, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, documented the wholesale eradication of species due to the heedlessness of human beings, Under a White Sky crushingly demonstrates how bereft we are of recourse that is not also potentially catastrophic.
It is, as she puts it, “a book about the world spinning out of control” amid earnest efforts by scientists to curb the damage as best they can. These efforts include electrifying waterways to block the spread of leaping invasive fish and splicing genes into living things to program them to self-destruct. (“What could possibly go wrong?” Kolbert wonders, facetiously.)
"Under a White Sky" by Elizabeth Kolbert
At this moment, people all over the world are staging massive interventions to save individual endangered species. Research teams are engaged in “assisted evolution” to breed coral that can withstand rising ocean acidity. Some scientists are working on ways to suck carbon from the air and inject it underground. Others are looking to blast particles into the atmosphere to block the sun to reduce global temperatures that are rising because of other gunk we’ve already put there.
All of these approaches are risky and none are elegant. They don’t represent progress so much as desperate attempts at coping. They are not, as Kolbert notes, “improvements on the originals.”
And yet, genetic engineering might be the only way to bring species back from the brink—if not the fact—of extinction. Virtually every positive scenario for the future conjured up by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change requires some negative emissions—that is, the removal of carbon dioxide already in the atmosphere. The problems created by technology will require technological solutions, at least to some extent, if they are to be solved at all.
“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand wrote in the first Whole Earth Catalog in 1968. Others disagree. “We are not as gods,” replied biologist E.O. Wilson. British writer Paul Kingsnorth nailed it: “We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it, and now we have run out of time.”
This is the central conundrum that plays out in the pages of Under a White Sky. Kolbert, an excellent writer, travels the globe to look at cutting-edge efforts to mitigate the messes we’ve made. There is no introduction to map out the book’s concept, nothing to ease the shock of what’s to come in quixotic efforts balanced on the horrifying edge of futility.
Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring under the working title, The Control of Nature, which her book describes as “a phrase conceived in arrogance.” (This title was later used by John McPhee for his collection of stories about grand-scale attempts to bring technology to bear in fights against flooding rivers, erupting volcanoes, and crumbling mountainsides.)
In fact, if you combat global warming by filtering out the sun, you have to do it year after year at ever-growing levels, likely disrupting rain patterns, exacerbating droughts, and, researchers say, turning the sky from blue to white—hence the title of Kolbert’s book.
Efforts to muscle the natural world into submission are, if not doomed to fail, at least wildly unlikely to work without a hitch. It’s a lot easier to wreck the environment than fix it.
But the most chilling thing about Kolbert’s new book is not that it shows how time-intensive, unpredictable, dangerous, and costly it will be to preserve biological diversity, survive climate change, and address other problems caused by previous attempts to solve problems. What is most chilling is that we have left ourselves with no other choice—except, perhaps, for the whole human race to take collective action to dramatically change our behavior in pursuit of common goals.
And everybody knows there is little chance of that.