Elizabeth Kolbert. (Photo by John Kleiner)

To say that Earth is in crisis is an understatement. Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophicationthese are just some of the by-products of our speciess success, journalist Elizabeth Kolbert warns us about in her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. Kolbert has been studying the consequences of humanitys impact on Earth for decades as a contributor to The New Yorker and as the author of such books as the 2015 Pulitzer Prizewinning The Sixth Extinction, an exploration of the concept of extinction that posits mankind as a cataclysm as great as the asteroid that annihilated the dinosaurs.

In Under a White Sky, Kolbert ponders the nature of the future by examining a new pattern she attributes to the recursive logic of the Anthropocene: human interventions attempting to answer for past human interventions in the environment. The book chronicles the casualties of short-sighted human meddling with the planet and its resources and the present-day efforts being made to address that meddlingor, as Kolbert puts it, efforts to control the control of nature. Interviews with scientists in a wide array of disciplinesclimate scientists, climate entrepreneurs, biologists, glaciologists, and geneticistsreveal a trend of projects aiming to transform nature in order to save it. From the Mojave to lava fields in Iceland, Kolbert takes readers on a globe-spanning journey to explore these projects while weighing their pros, cons, and ethical implications (the books title refers to the way the sky could be bleached of color as a potential side effect of solar geoengineering, one of the proposed interventions to combat global warming). The issue, at this point, Kolbert writes, is not whether were going to alter nature, but to what end?

I spoke to Kolbert over the phone the day after President Joe Bidens inauguration. We talked about what its like to write a book about a big question you dont yet have the answer to, and what it will take to undo the environmental damage incurred during the Trump years.

Naomi Elias

Naomi Elias: You describe Under A White Sky as a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. Can you explain that a little?

Elizabeth Kolbert: The pattern that Im looking at in the book is ways in which humans have intervenedor, if you prefer, mucked around withthe natural world and then have decided that the consequences are bad and are now looking for new forms of intervention to try to solve those problems. I start with the example of the Chicago River, which was reversed in an extraordinary engineering project at the beginning of the 20th century. The Chicago River used to flow east into Lake Michigan, which also happened to be Chicagos only source of drinking water. All of Chicagos human and animal waste flowed into Lake Michigan and there were constant outbreaks of typhoid and cholera. So Chicago decided, Well, we really have to do something about it, and what they did was this incredible engineering project, and now it flows basically to the southwest and eventually into the Mississippi, and all of Chicagos waste flows in the same direction. When the canal that reversed the river was put into place, there was a headline in The New York Times that ran something like, Water Flows in the Chicago River Again. It was so thick with muck that people joked a chicken could walk across it without getting its feet wet. That created a big problem that connected two huge drainage systems, the Great Lakes drainage system and the Mississippi drainage system, that has now led to all these species, including many invasive species, crossing from one basin into the other. It was having bad effects on the ecology of both systems, so to try to prevent these species from crossing from one basin to the other, theyve now electrified a significant chunk of this canal. So thats an intervention, as it were, on top of an intervention, and that is really the pattern that the book explores.

NE: The book visits project sites in Iceland, Australia, New Orleans, and the California desert. What drew you to the projects you write about?

EK: The first project that got me started down this whole path was the super coral project, which is currently in Hawaii and partly in Australia. As the oceans warm, corals are having a lot of trouble surviving. We get these coral-bleaching events that Im sure people have heard about. Some scientists were looking at how we can save coral reefs and the idea they came up with was that we need to intervene and try to coax along evolution so that these creatures can survive climate change. That struck me as a really interesting project, and got me thinking about this question of, Can we intervene to redress our own interventions? Once I started seeing that pattern, I started to see it everywhere. I could have gone to many different parts of the world and written stories that made the same point, but the projects that I went to were emblematic in some way. They were taking on different issues like climate change or invasive species, the loss of wetlandsthe list goes on.

NE: Did any of these effortsbe it the Harvard team trying to combat global warming by firing diamonds into the stratosphere or the group looking to reduce rodent populations with genetic manipulationconvince you that our best chance of averting climate apocalypse really is to control the control of nature? Are we digging ourselves out of a hole or just digging a deeper one?

EK: You know, you have identified the question at the center of the book. That is a question that I dont claim to answer. Im not a prophet. Im really trying to tease out that question in the book. Look at it, and have some fun with it, to be honest, and get people to think about the pattern. In many cases, these solutions are working to a certain extent. New Orleans would not exist without massive human intervention to solve the problems of water. In New Orleansa city thats essentially significantly below sea levelit turns out you need flooding to keep the land from subsiding even further because thats actually what built the land, the flooding that dropped a lot of sediment across the Mississippi Delta over many millennia. Are you getting into a trap when you pile these interventions on top of each other? Do you have alternatives? These are the big questions of our time.

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NE: Id like to talk about your feelings about the popular phrase for the geological epoch were living in, the Anthropocene. In 2017 you gave a lecture at Manhattans New School, in which you said, Thinking scientifically about mans place in the world used to mean acknowledging our insignificance. This new human-centered term, the age of man, completely upends that. Can you talk about your feelings about the term and what it means for how we think about our relationship to the Earth?

EK: I think we are at this interesting turning point thats on some level been the subject of all the books Ive written, and a lot of the articles as well. We first decentered humans, right? It wasnt that the sun revolved around the Earth, it was that the Earth revolved around the sun. Theres a lot of these discoveries that have proved people are not the center of the universe, but then we get to the present moment, where we do have to acknowledge that we are becoming the dominant force in many very essential ways. We have to acknowledge that and, on some level, take responsibility for that. This term, the Anthropocene, is kind of a shorthand for all the ways that humans are affecting the Earth on what is sometimes called a geological scale. We are changing the carbon cycle very dramatically, were changing the nitrogen cycle, were acidifying the ocean. Weve even got to the point where we regularly cause earthquakes. We are definitely driving evolution; we are probably driving speciation. We are at this moment
of tremendous human impact and we need to rise to that challenge of thinking about what we want the world to look like now that we are such a dominant force.

NE: In the book, you take note of the way the scientists you speak to encode a sense of moral urgency into their analysis of the climate crisis, which is something I feel present in contemporary climate reporting too. Youve been on the climate beat for decades. Have you felt a shift in the work? Do you feel like you now have an agenda when you write?

EK: Theres definitely been a shift in the sense that, when I started out almost 20 years ago, there was still, among a lot of pretty knowledgeable people, a lot of confusion. What is climate change? Is it real? Do I have to worry about it? The conversation has moved dramatically, at least in a big chunk of the US and a big chunk of the world. But I do not consider myself an advocate. Im a journalist and I try to report stories that I think illuminate the situation that were in. Ive thought about, you know, Should I be writing some sort of prescriptive journalism? But thats not really me.

NE: At the end of that same 2017 lecture you conclude, We are the fate of Earth. You call humans ethical agents and say that were failing as ethical agents if we dont acknowledge our impact.

EK: Yes, I certainly stand by those words. I mean, this book is on the one hand grappling with, on the other hand sort of playing around with, those questions. Our impact on the planet and the untold number of other species with whom we share the planet and whom we frankly dont spend a lot of time thinking aboutand dont even understand to a great extentI think will come to be seen as one of the great tragedies and the great ethical failings of humanity.

NE: So many of the things you discuss in the book were set in motion long before the 2016 election, but its hard to overstate what a setback the last four years of the Trump administration have been for the climate. An analysis from The New York Times cites over 100 environmental protections Trump reversed concerning areas like wetland and wildlife protection, and air and water pollution. In his inauguration speech yesterday, President Biden talked about answering the cry for survival Earth was letting out, and he immediately signed an order to rejoin the Paris climate accord. Im wondering what your thoughts are on what your job is going to look like under the Biden administration, and if you think we dodged some kind of metaphorical asteroid?

EK: I think what Trump did was egregious. It was an attempt to set us off completely on the wrong trajectory. Its a very complicated situation legally because now a lot of regulations will have to be rewritten. Its going to occupy the EPA for years, unfortunately. Thats very sad and just a waste of time and of human effort, when we should be doing a lot of other things. But, you know, there are great forces at work here and fortunately some of those continue to go in the right direction, like the tremendous decrease in prices of wind power and solar power that continued despite Donald Trumps best efforts to try to undermine renewable power. One could spend the next four years doing nothing but looking at the legal ins and outs of trying to undo that, and I think that that would be a noble thing to do. What Im thinking about areI dont want to call them bigger questions, but theyre the questions of our human impact on the planet, which are not going to change because Joe Biden suddenly rejoined the Paris Agreement, unfortunately.

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Will We Ever Fully Understand Humans Impact on Nature? - The Nation