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.
