Elizabeth Kolbert has written a book that tells us all the ways in which we are destroying the natural world which gave humans the chance to create civilization. That's not a flippant description. She uses examples, and she starts with our attempts to control the Mississippi River, which have resulted in the gradual dissolution and sinking of southern Louisiana, and moves on to the introduction of exotic species to that river, notably Asian Carp, which are destroying the ecosystem of the Mississ...

Suppose that the world — or just a small group of assertive nations — launched a fleet of SAILs (Stratospheric Aerosol Injection Lofters). And suppose that even as the SAILs are flying and lofting more and more tons of particles, global emissions continue to rise. The result would not be a return to the climate of pre-industrial days or to that of the Pliocene or even that of the Eocene, when crocodiles baked on Arctic shores. It would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedented world, w

Near the end of this book the author offers a succinct summary of the book, "This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems." One would think that the lesson here is to stop trying to solve problems and stop messing with nature.But humans have been messing with nature for millennia and can't quit now. Ever since humans learned how to start fires, practice agriculture, and transform heat into energy to perform work (a.k.a. industrial revoluti...

Human activity has been so successful at changing the environment that it is now the dominant influence in the natural world. Kolbert’s excellent reporting recounts how efforts of humans to solve one ecological problem often invite new ones (eg. the importation of the Asian Carp that now threatens the Great Lakes; flood control efforts on the Mississippi that is now causing land depletion in the Louisiana Bayou). Kolbert met with a number of scientists that are trying to reverse the course of th...

Not a direct quote, but it is stated that this is a book about solving the problems created by those trying to solve problems. Problems we humans have caused either through tampering with nature or our lack of caring enough to take care of what we have been given in our natural world. From the Asian carp to the tiny pup fish in Nevada, from the coral in the barrier reefs which is dying due to the warming of the oceans, to the huge frogs imported to the Caribbean, which have now spread to Austral...

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is a book about people who are trying to fix problems people have created. They are using techniques such as gene drives to cut back on invasive species, assisted evolution to help vulnerable species adapt to a changing world, and geoengineering to lessen global warming.While there were some sections I enjoyed, such as the one about Devils Hole pupfish that exist nowhere on Earth except for Devil's Hole in Death Valley National Park, most of this was i...

Have you ever watched any of those famous British documentary series on our planet? If you haven't, you absolutely should — they're phenomenal (how do they get that amazing footage??). Narrated by the incomparable David Attenborough, most — "Planet Earth," "Frozen Planet," "Blue Planet" — have aired on the BBC, but the most recent, "Our Planet," was released on Netflix. Much of these series, particularly "Our Planet," focuses on the harm that humans are doing to the environment and the creatures...

When I saw that Elizabeth Kolbert's newest book was coming out I was quite excited - The Sixth Extinction was a fantastic book.Sadly, Under a White Sky did not captivate me the same way. It wasn't really what I was expecting, either. It's essentially a collection of science journalism focused on the environment - specifically, the ways that humans are interfering with the environment in an attempt to solve the problems created by previous attempts. It's quite interesting...but it's missing somet...

In many ways, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future is the continuation of Elizabeth Kolbert’s Pulitzer-winning The Sixth Extinction, in which humanity has been shown to have a mind-boggling amount of agency and power to shape their environment on a global scale—for good or ill. And that when the scale has swung decidedly towards bad—see climate change—that there are humans fighting back with interventions just as grand. Fighting fire with fire.Because the scale of global change is overwhe...

"I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.” 4.2/5Absolutely informative from start to finish. Elizabeth Kolbert begins this novel in the Chicago river. She discusses the history of the Chicago ecosystem and the project to reverse the flow of the river to prevent invasive species from migrating into Lake Michigan. This sets the scenes for her journey into finding out ways humanity is trying to reverse the destruction they have caus

The title, Under A White Sky, refers to weird side effects we might see as a result of injecting particles into the stratosphere to mitigate global warming. Geoengineering being but one of the topics Elizabeth Kolbert covers in this wide ranging book.“Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.” ~ Elizabeth KolbertThis and more contributing to the ongoing si...

A big dissapointment compared to The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. Feels like the author gathered some articles and put them together, the only common point being, as she put it, "people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems." And that's exactly what this book is about: people messed with the environment and now they are trying to fix it.Asian carp, brought to solve algae problems in US rivers, are now a like a plague, and all efforts are directed to keep

This is a well-written but very depressing book. The capacity of human race's destruction has already reshaped the natural world. We live in a depleted world. In order to “control” nature, we end up creating problems, then we create more “controls” to control the control. The problem of Asian carps, introduced to the United States to control the harmful chemicals in the water, is now threatening the ecosystem of the Great Lakes. Another example the author explained is that various projects in Lo...

4.5 starsIn her 2015 book 'The Sixth Extinction', author Elizabeth Kolbert sounds the alarm about humans imperiling the Earth in the current 'Age of Man' - dubbed the Anthropocene. Kolbert observes that humans have transformed more than half the ice-free land on Earth. We've dammed or diverted most of the world's major rivers; our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined; and our planes, cars, trucks, and power stations emit about a hundred ti...

[ Cross-posted to the Nicola Bramwell Blog ] I honestly wasn’t a big fan of Kolbert’s The Sixth Extinction—I thought it was too long and meandering—so I’m happy to report that I enjoyed this book a whole lot more. It was much shorter and to the point, and it provided a lot of interesting information about conservation efforts that I had never heard of before.While Kolbert reviews the various environmental issues plaguing us today, she spends less time describing these issues in detail and mor

On Barack Obama his reading list 2021 📖 A book about people trying to solve problems created by people who created problems when trying to solve other problemsPissing your pants will only keep you warm for so longA fascinating peek at geo engineering, gene drives and the overall ethics of humanity's relationship with technology and nature. The adagium of the road to hell being paved with good intentions is very clearly shown in Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert. Th...

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Yeah we're basically screwed. I loved Kolbert's book The Sixth Extinction about the anthropocene and this one seems like a followup and serves as a catalogue of all the crazy things humans are doing and have done to shape the environment. It's not data driven--but rather she focuses on individuals and communities and the habitats they are changing--for good and for bad. It's all pretty bleak.

Elizabeth Kolbert takes readers on a journey around the world in search of the latest scientific thinking with regard to reversing the damage done to the planet by humankind. Climate change is only one of the areas of focus. She also covers invasive species and other interventions that may have been intended to help, but have actually hurt, the environment and must now be contained, or reversed, if possible. It reads as a collection of essays. I was particularly interested in the method of extra...

'Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future' by Elizabeth Kolbert is a review of various theoretical and some current scientific test experiments. The scientists want to either increase the hardiness of species in order for them to survive a hotter environment or to slow down the incoming catastrophe of global warming through manipulation of what is in the atmosphere. Global warming is inevitable. The fixes people are exploring to solve the problems in slowing down its inevitable arrival and at...