Under a White Sky Main Ideas

Defying Nature

Kolbert makes it clear that human attempts to defy nature by controlling it have catastrophic consequences that can barely be mitigated by further human activity. These attempts can theoretically be traced back 8,000 to 9,000 years ago, to humans’ first domestication of wheat in the Middle East and rice in Asia. As an engineer with Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) puts it, “When we as humans intervene, it rarely turns out well.”

In Part 1, Kolbert stresses the nearly futile attempts to reverse the impact of human control on American waterways. Chapter 1 focuses on the efforts to stop the spread of a non-native species of fish into Midwestern waters; Chapter 2 focuses on the efforts to stop the loss of land in the Mississippi River’s delta caused by structures built to control the river. In both cases, the efforts are vastly expensive and can barely contain the original problem, if at all.

In Part 2, Kolbert describes the ways in which human activity has created threats to species and whole ecosystems that can barely be mitigated. Land development has threatened the highly endangered Devils Hole pupfish, setting off a series of unsuccessful efforts to save the fish. Only a federal lawsuit that went to the Supreme Court could save the fish, and it is now dependent on humans for survival. While the process of natural selection has created the Great Barrier Reef with its incredible number of species, under current conditions it is only realistic to think of preserving part of the reef. And like the introduced carp in Part 1, the cane toads introduced to control beetles are threatening native species.

Part 3 focuses on scientists’ attempts to remove or block the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that is causing global climate change and its weather-related disasters. These scientists realize that their attempts to control climate change could have unforeseen consequences, such as damage to the ozone layer and the “white sky” of the book’s title. Ultimately, all the scientists Kolbert discusses face their work as what the author calls “techno-fatalism.” They understand that they can’t really solve the problems created by defying nature. They can only try their best ideas with as much enthusiasm as possible.  

The New World

In Part 1, Chapter 2, Kolbert refers to the “brave new world of the Anthropocene,” that is, the current geological age in which the dominant influence on climate and the environment is human activity. Earlier in this section she has defined the “logic of the Anthropocene”: the way in which humans react to the overwhelmingly negative effect of activity that controls and changes nature is to try to control those controls. She expects readers to understand the reference to Aldous Huxley’s 1932 novel Brave New World, a futuristic work in which children are bred in laboratories and sorted into social classes and citizens are drugged to serve those in power. Huxley in turn took his novel’s title from Shakespeare’s play The Tempest. In all three works, the phrase is a form of verbal irony; the new worlds described by the authors are frightening, not brave or splendid.

In Part 2, Kolbert discusses the biodiversity crisis—the phrase for a high pace of extinction—that exists in this new world. Extinction rates are exponentially higher than the rates for the rest of geological time. Furthermore, the losses reach across continents and oceans and across all groups of organisms. Birds, insects, and entire ecosystems are threatened. The response of scientists has been to devise solutions that increasingly blur the line between humans and nature. These include “conservation-reliant” species, the “assisted evolution” that attempts to genetically engineer heat-resistant corals, and editing the genes of invasive pests.

Part 3 shows the role that geoengineering will play in the “brave new world.” As geologist Dan Schrag puts it, engineering the climate might be “the best chance for survival for most of the earth’s natural ecosystems,” but if the engineering systems are deployed, perhaps the ecosystems “should no longer be called natural.” 

A Different Kind of Salvation

Salvation for the future may lie in changing the way people think about issues such as invasive and endangered species, the artificial marshes being built by the US Army Corps of Engineers in Plaquemines Parish, Louisiana, and carbon dioxide emissions. Physicist Klaus Lackner sums it up this way: “We need to change the paradigm” and accept that problems such as climate change are here to stay and are not “bad.” There is no alternative. And as Kolbert puts it, rejecting the technologies that might fix the damage done to nature by human activity because they are “unnatural” isn’t going to restore the environment. She describes the issue at hand as “not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end?” Thus, as far-fetched as some of the projects she describes in the book may be, technology may offer our best hope for preserving the future of the planet.

Furthermore, as writer Carlos Lozada points out in reviewing Under a White Sky for The Washington Post, reading the book can actually be inspiring when one considers the many “creative and dedicated scientists, researchers, and conservationists” whom Kolbert meets. For example, the work of scientist Ruth Gates to save coral reefs represents one possible way to address threatened species and ecosystems. Gates can’t stop the fossil fuel emissions that change ocean temperatures and chemistry, but she can attempt to breed a more resistant type of coral.

Another scientist, Mark Tizard, takes a practical approach to his area of expertise, genetic engineering. In a world that is already damaged by invasive species, he believes we can try to break their destructive patterns. He calls this “using our understanding of biological processes to see if we can benefit a system that is in trauma.” David Keith believes that the world can both make significant cuts in carbon emissions and create effective techniques to remove carbon. And Harvard’s Dan Schrag considers geoengineering to be “the best chance for survival” for most of the planet’s ecosystems. The cautious optimism of such scientists might be the best hope for salvation that Kolbert can offer.