Under a White Sky

The Nature of the Future

By: Elizabeth Kolbert

Narrated by: Rebecca Lowman

The New York Times best-selling 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 10,000-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.

©2021 Elizabeth Kolbert (P)2021 Simon & Schuster Audio

Amazing and Heartbreaking

Kolbert is an amazing author. I appreciate her optimism, but more I appreciate her realism in the face of man's destruction of nature.

Disheartening

This is the second book I’ve read by the author. And probably my last. The outcome to this world’s “sins” and not necessary religious sins spelled out by the author are grim. The story telling is excellent and she has the art of “taking you there” to all the cool places and interesting people in her journeys. But by the end of the book the reader is left disheartened by the scope of what we have broken and the price necessary to fix it. Leaving us to think that the best thing is to just throw it all away and start from the beginning even if it means we are no longer in the picture. There is no way of fixing this.

shocking but strangely familiar future

Excellent writing and narration with a sense of awe and matter of factness that is rare in science writing.

Let’s get our act together people!

I’d love if we turned this stuff around. Seems like it should be the main focus of humanity at this point.

Masterpiece

Very informative and well written. Easy to understand despite the complexities of the topics discussed.