Under a White Sky

Starred review from December 14, 2020
Pulitzer-winner Kolbert (The Sixth Extinction) focuses once again on the Anthropocene in this illuminating study of humans’ “control of nature.” Humans have already changed the natural world, she writes, and now are innovating to counter the fallout. As she surveys climate-related discoveries, Kolbert describes barriers erected to keep Asian carp out of the Great Lakes after the carp were brought to America in 1963 to “keep aquatic weeds in check.” She also tells of the divers who conduct a yearly “census” on the Devil’s Hole pupfish, a threatened species surviving in a single pond in the Mojave Desert. Kolbert notes the irony and ingenuity of humans battling natural processes to which they have contributed: the dams and levees along the Mississippi River, for instance, were “built to keep southern Louisiana dry” but have caused a massive “land-loss crisis” due to flooding elsewhere in the state. Along the way, Kolbert covers interventions on the cutting edge of science, such as “assisted evolution,” which would help coral reefs endure warmer oceans. Her style of immersive journalism (which involves being hit by a jumping carp, observing coral sex, and watching as millennia-old ice is pulled from the ice sheets of Greenland) makes apparent the challenges of “the whole-earth transformation” currently underway. This investigation of global change is brilliantly executed and urgently necessary. Agent: Kathy Robbins, the Robbins Office.

January 15, 2021
More top-notch environmental reportage from the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction. In the manner of fellow New Yorker contributor John McPhee, every paragraph of Kolbert's books has a mountain of reading and reporting behind it. In her latest, the author opens with a consideration of America's most important waterways, the Mississippi and the Great Lakes, which meet near Chicago but "are--or were--distinct aquatic worlds." We learn the reason for the past tense via Kolbert's sharp account of the overweening engineering project that reversed the flow of Chicago's wastewaters to send them not into the lakes but into the river. This created an artificial channel that has allowed invasive species from the south, such as Asian carp, into the lakes and creatures such as the zebra mussel from the lakes into the river. Things are no better down south in New Orleans, where the author finds a Mississippi Delta inundated by rising seas. "If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory," she writes, "America would have only forty-nine states. Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field's worth of land." All of these processes feed neatly into Kolbert's overarching theme of human-caused disasters. Her travels are wide and often challenging, as when she visited remote waterholes in the Mojave Desert to examine isolated populations of pupfish or when she interviewed ornithologists and entomologists to better understand the staggering decline in avian and insect species. "Even among insects, a class long thought to be extinction-resistant, numbers are plunging," she writes, a process that extends across ecosystems everywhere. Especially vulnerable are coral reefs, which Kolbert examines in meticulous, exquisite detail. Can we and the world be saved from ourselves? That's an up-in-the-air question, but the author holds out hope in a program that makes use of geoengineering, which, though highly speculative, is something that must be considered. Urgent, absolutely necessary reading as a portrait of our devastated planet.

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Starred review from February 1, 2021

Kolbert, author of the best-selling The Sixth Extinction, invites us to explore the question of whether technological solutions are the only answers left to rectify human-generated environmental problems. Using several case studies, she illustrates how humankind has had to deal with environmental repercussions whenever it seeks to control nature, and how the first instinct is to apply more or different technology, which often exacerbates the problem. But simply removing or reversing the original "solution" may be too little, too late as the rate of the environmental impact accelerates past the capacity of nature to recalibrate itself. Whether it is invasions of exotic species, levee-induced erosion, climate-induced extinctions, or anthropogenic climate change, Kolbert investigates current efforts at mitigation not with optimistic boosterism, but with a resigned and questioning fatalism. It is a tale not of magic-bullet remedies where maybe this time things will be different when we intervene in nature, but rather of deploying a panoply of strategies big and small in hopes that there is still time to make a difference and atone for our past. VERDICT A sobering and realistic look at humankind's perhaps misplaced faith that technology can work with nature to produce a more livable planet. Similiar to her previous book, Kolbert's latest offers engaging popular science. --Wade Lee-Smith, Univ. of Toledo Lib.

Copyright 2021 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

February 1, 2021
In the future, nature will be even less "natural" than it is now, even more torqued by humankind. Following her Pulitzer Prize-winning The Sixth Extinction (2014), science writer extraordinaire Kolbert reports on man-made natural disasters and less-than-reassuring attempts and plans to ameliorate them. Writing with trenchant wit and stinging matter-of-factness, Kolbert observes "how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one." Always game and curious, she accompanies scientists on expeditions to imperiled coral reefs; Greenland's melting ice sheet; Illinois waterways, where Asian carp are threatening ecosystems; Devils Hole, Nevada, where researchers are trying to preserve a unique species of desert fish; and an enormous indoor model of the Mississippi Delta used to study the region's severe land loss. Kolbert considers the implications of technological intervention, including "assisted evolution" and genetic engineering, to save at-risk species or eradicate such invasive species as the cane toad in Australia. As for the rising levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide, Kolbert meets with scientists working on extreme geoengineering countermeasures, including one that could turn the blue sky white. A master elucidator, Kolbert is gratifyingly direct as she assesses our predicament between a rock and a hard place, creating a clarion and invaluable "book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems."

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