SNQ: Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under A White Sky”

by Miles Raymer

Under A White Sky

Summary:

Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under A White Sky is about the history and possible futures of geoengineering. Specifically, Kolbert examines how various geoengineering technologies are being used or may soon be used to combat the worst effects of climate change. Part One, “Down the River,” describes efforts to keep invasive Asian carp out of the Great Lakes, and also how we are managing sea level rise and flooding in the Mississippi River Delta. Part Two, “Into the Wild,” describes attempts by biologists to save endangered species such as the Devils Hole pupfish in Death Valley and coral in the Great Barrier Reef, as well as CRISPR-based attempts to curtail the harmful spread of the cane toad in Australia. Part Three, “Up in the Air,” examines theories and methods of solar geoengineering, which is probably our quickest, cheapest, and most effective method of climate change mitigation available at the moment, but which may also have significant unintended consequences for climate (in)stability.

Key Concepts and Notes:

  • Kolbert repeatedly discusses the “irony loop” or “recursive logic of the Anthropocene,” a dynamic whereby solutions to old problems create new problems that then require new solutions (117).
  • Kolbert effectively critiques the traditional conceptualization of “untouched nature,” arguing that at this point in history all environments across the globe have been significantly impacted by human activity in one way or another.
  • When it comes to something as complex and unpredictable as geoengineering, it’s critical to avoid broad generalizations about what it will or will not do. The details and specific context of any given proposal matter much more than any philosophical or ethical judgments about the fundamental goodness or permissibility of geoengineering as a tool.
  • Given the extreme dangers of climate change and the new technologies we will have to leverage to cope with them, Kolbert asserts that we are entering a new era, an Anthropocene in which we will increasingly inhabit and create “no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future” for humanity and the rest of life on Earth (7-8).
  • In general, Kolbert does a good job of remaining neutral in a classic journalistic fashion. She seems skeptical of geoengineering as a default (or personal bias), but gives both the pros and cons a fair shake.

Favorite Quotes:

Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn’t going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing…The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end? (137)

Yes, people have fundamentally altered the atmosphere. And, yes, this is likely to lead to all sorts of dreadful consequences. But people are ingenious. They come up with crazy, big ideas, and sometimes these actually work. (153)

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientist and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt. The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds––these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than that might be called techno-fatalism. They weren’t improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances. As one replicant in Blade Runner says to Harrison Ford, who may or may not be playing a replicant: “You think I’d be working in a place like this if I could afford a real snake?”

It’s in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives and digging millions of trenches to bury billions of trees have to be assessed. Geoengineering may be “entirely crazy and quite disconcerting,” but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, or take some of the “pain and suffering away,” or help prevent no-longer-fully-natural ecosystems from collapsing, doesn’t it have to be considered? (200)

Rating: 7/10