AudioFile Magazineâs Best Audiobooks of 2021
The New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe returns to humanityâs transformative impact on the environment in Under a White Sky.
That man should have dominion âover all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earthâ is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that itâs 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 Prizeâwinning 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 worldâs 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 âsuper coralâ 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 ten-thousand-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.
