The New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction and
Field Notes from a Catastrophe returns to humanity's transformative
impact on the environment in Under a White Sky.
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. The
question we now face is: Can we change nature, this time in order to
save it?
Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth
Extinction, takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along
the way, she meets scientists 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.
