Book Review: Under a White Sky, The Nature of the Future

Here’s my book review of Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert. Before I read it, I admit to some trepidation. I often avoid books that describe portents for our future. After all, plenty of that hits my social media threads daily. What makes a book appear on Barack Obama’s Summer 2021 reading list though? It also has a cover quote from Bill Gates and a chapter on solar engineering – a technology Gates is heavily invested in. ‘A terrific look at humanity’s impact on the Earth’ Gates says in a cover note. All the more intriguing, since Kolbert sums up the book as:

“… about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems”

Are we being sold up the river?

The book begins on an expedition ‘down the river’ … as Kolbert says, ‘rivers make good metaphors’.

I was shocked to discover how authorities stop the spread of oxygen-choking foreign fish (carp). As a result, you’d die if you swum in parts of the Chicago River. Not because there is no oxygen. The United States Army Corps of Engineers passes electricity into the water. The current’s gradient (electrical current that is) becomes uncomfortable for bigger fish to swim into and makes them turn back. Big fish like us would be electrocuted in its fully charged headwaters. It’s a cheap way to solve a complex problem.

The issue of invasive carp inflated after we dug channels to connect rivers and lakes together. If the carp reach Lake Michigan, it will affect a $7 billion fishing industry. Kolbert reports it would take 25 years and $18 billion dollar to dig the country out of this mess it dug itself into. Are these fixes less a case of saving things down river or being sold up it? Nature abhors a vacuum and it is surely a matter of time before the fish inevitably find their way.

Stockholm species

These fishy stories set up the rest of the book as Kolbert takes readers on a journey through the Mississippi. Around New Orleans, layer upon layer of misadventure heap up into a tangled mess of continual adaptation. Not to Earth’s natural perturbations but the unintended and twisted consequences of human endeavour. I have to admit the sums of money the US spend are bewildering. At the same time, the effort, political will and determination is too.

I’ve always thought of the US a bit like a puffed-up pigeon. People want to be seen as bigger than the competition. But is biggest always the best? It certainly seems that way for the Devils Hole Pupfish. This unassuming species has a population of fewer than 200 individuals. If it wasn’t for big ambitions, these species would already be extinct.

The pupfish occur in one sinkhole next to the hottest place on Earth: Death Valley. But they endure a split existence now. Half occur in the heavily-guarded natural pool and another in a multi billion dollar purpose-built replica nearby.

Kolbert refers to it as a ‘Stockholm species’, a term I very much hope gathers popular use!

It describes an animal that is ‘utterly dependent on its persecutors’. It is the direction that many of our threatened species are heading. In my opinion, is not a good outcome. Animals exist for a reason and are part of nature. Having to control wildlife’s destiny at the expense of what they do for us, all seems a bit narcissistic.

Can we control ecosystems?

A microscopic beetle has thwarted the mock habitat pupfish live in. This is a reminder that even the smallest can wield mighty power. It also recalls another nearby attempt at self-contained ecosystemsHow ecosystems function An ecosystem is a community of lifeforms that interact in such an optimal way that how ecosystems function best, is when all components (including humans and other animals) can persist and live alongside each other for the longest time possible. Ecosystems are fuelled by the energy created by plants (primary producers) that convert the Sun's heat energy More that failed spectacularly, the Biosphere 2 experiment in Arizona.

Strangely enough, humans have never managed to create an artificial habitat out of steel and fibreglass. Such systems lack the full diversity of fauna (right down to microbes). And, it can take thousands of years for animal culture to develop and lock-in stabilising patterns of behaviour. As Kolbert says:

It’s often observed that nature–or at least the concept of it–is tangled up in culture. Until there was something that could be set against it–technology, art, consciousness–there was only “nature”, and so no real use for the category.

The statement by Great Barrier Reef researcher Hardisty sums up this irony by saying:

‘It’s just absolute hubris to and so arrogant to think that we can survive without everything else’. Which leads Kolbert to wonder, if it wasn’t ‘just another kind of hubris to imagine “all-of-reef-scale interventions?”‘.

The Nature of the Future

It was around this point in the book Kolbert starts to hint further at a level of self-deprecating cynicism. She stands withteams of eager scientists and students, artificially impregnating corals that would never have met in the wild. Like the founders of an insane dating app, no-one could help but think ‘is this what it’s come to?’ Is this is the ‘Nature of the Future’?

This is what Kolbert writes about so eloquently. Like any good journalist, she does enough to promote those thoughts without ever quite giving away the game.

It was also at this point of the book that I began to wonder where all the women are? Apart from a section on the late and great Ruth Gates, most of the CEOs, managers and outspoken protagonists of technology to control nature, are men. For the remaining half of the book, it swerves to genetic engineering and geo-engineering.

Both technologies have the potential to wipe out humanity … or save it.

The team I had most sympathy for, were the Climeworks guys in Zurich selling carbon sequestration. This and other technologies work. The problem is, they are not financially viable. Meanwhile, reforestation and biofuel projects are cropping up. To scale these, however, will require a huge impact on wildlife and ecosystems. It would be trading off against our own survival in other ways.

For now, we remain at the mercy of economics. That prefers to subsidise putting carbon into the atmosphere but doesn’t charge for taking it back out again. And the ‘solutions’, as Kolbert implies, may just make things worse.

Mad scientists or saviours?

Ultimately, this is the question that Kolbert leaves us with. It’s not for her to answer, she says as much. It is for society though.

We are perhaps a decade off technology that would enable us to turn off female chromosomes in mammals like us. Scientists don’t pull punches with their rhetoric either – they call them ‘shredder genes’. These are genes that go through and shred the life out of populations. The technology is heralded as a possible silver bullet against invading animal populations. Similar technology thought impossible 20 years ago, as Kolbert discovers, can already be bought online in DIY kits from silicon valley startups.

David Keith is professor of applied physics at Harvard, working on solar geoengineering. When Kolbert suggest humans don’t have a very good track record at control, he unamiably responds:

“To people who say most of our technological fixes go wrong, I say, ‘Okay, did agriculture go wrong?’

[picture tumbleweed rolling across frame and faint sound of wind gusts.]

For some reason, when I hear scientists getting over-excited, it brings to mind this infamous Southpark sketch.

Under a White Sky: Book Review

Throughout Kolbert’s book the same theme recurs. Are our efforts to control nature madness? Won’t mother Earth push back even harder? Is our technology a means to an end, or the end itself? Are we placing our faith in over-ambitious mad scientists or is there a better way?

If all this technology is inevitable, there is no indication we’re any good at it but will we have a choice?

This is why should all wonder about the wisdom of Bill Gates and other billionaire men wielding their financial might and political clout. Kolbert says ‘You might hope that such [decisions] would be made equitably’. As one scientist says, when the future of the planet is at stake, money is no object. If that’s the case, who is really in control?

If it’s not us, it’s nature.

I’m glad I read and did a book review of Under a White Sky. It is a wonderful book and a very nice read. For me, it’s another reason to know we cannot survive without nature in all its glory. It’s even more reason to fight for a world where animals can do their thing. Before we invest in dangerous technology ‘trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems’, maybe we should seriously consider rebuilding what we’ve have lost.

Read an extract

• Published: 2 March 2021
• ISBN: 9781847925459
• Imprint: Bodley Head
• Format: Trade Paperback
• Pages: 256
• RRP: $29.99

https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/617060/under-a-white-sky-by-elizabeth-kolbert/