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, where silver carp glisten under a white sky.
My friend, Delight,is an eco-fatalist (she would call herself a “realist”) and she has long teased me for being a naive optimist: while it’s true that I have hope that human ingenuity will think us out of our various anthropogenic-caused crises, Delight believes that humans are inherently brutish and selfish and willfully committed to profiting off destruction unto the end of the Earth. Wading into this debate, author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert (whose last successful book, The Sixth Extinction, didn’t really inspire me as much as I had hoped it would), returns with Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. In her latest offering, Kolbert revisits familiar material (hopping around the globe to report on species at risk), but of even more interest to me, she reports on the work of scientists who are racing against the doomsday clock, using cutting-edge science to repair the damage we humans have wrought and knowingly changing the planet in order to save the planet. Ultimately, this book is hopeful — smart people are indeed at work behind the scenes — and it also asks us to consider the consequences of our interventions: If lofting tons of calcium carbonate into the atmosphere would cool the planet, would we even notice (or care) if the sky slowly turned white? And to those who would complain that a white sky isn’t natural, scientists can point to every square meter on Earth to show that it has already been changed by the presence of mankind; changing nature is what we do. Overall: an informative work that left me much to think about and employ in debates with my more fatalistic friend. (Note: I read an ARC through NetGalley and passages quoted may not be in their final forms.)
The way (Klaus) Lackner sees things, the key to avoiding “deep trouble” is thinking differently. “We need to change the paradigm,” he told me. Carbon dioxide, in his view, should be regarded much the same way we look at sewage. We don’t expect people to stop producing waste. “Rewarding people for going to the bathroom less would be nonsensical,” Lackner has observed. At the same time, we don’t let them shit on the sidewalk. One of the reasons we’ve had such trouble addressing the carbon problem, he contends, is the issue has acquired an ethical charge. To the extent that emissions are seen as bad, emitters become guilty. “Such a moral stance makes virtually everyone a sinner and makes hypocrites out of many who are concerned about climate change but still partake in the benefits of modernity,” he has written. Shifting the paradigm, he thinks, will shift the conversation. 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.
Under a White Sky is all about the crazy, big ideas. Kolbert starts with scientists who are trying to fix the unintended consequences of past scientists’ best-intended interventions (like dealing with the Asian carp infestations in American waterways — fish that were intentionally introduced after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring called for the end of chemical pesticides — and efforts to protect New Orleans from future flooding — apparently decades of diverting water away from the city has prevented the natural deposits of sediment that underpin it). And there’s quite a bit on species at risk due to climate change — and just like in The Sixth Extinction, I found it sometimes hard to get worked up over what Kolbert chose to write about. Here, she reports at length on the fate of the Devils Hole pupfish (a minnow-sized fish that lives in one small cavern in the Nevada desert), and while their numbers in the wild range between fifty and two hundred, there is also a multi-million dollar facility nearby that houses a climate-controlled replica of the Devils Hole cavern, with scientists working around the clock to support a captive-bred population. Personally, I am moved by the tragedy of rhinos being hunted into extinction by human greed, but I can’t really connect with the fate of this over-specialised, and biologically isolated, species; the Devils Hole pupfish seems like an evolutionary failure and I’m gobsmacked by the resources devoted to keeping it around (yet I am philosophically challenged by the defender of the similarly-fated Owens pupfish, Phil Pister, who when asked, “What good are pupfish?”, replied, “What good are you?” Touché.)
Kolbert travels to Australia to visit a coral research/breeding facility (which I can totally get behind, a coral reef having more biodiversity per square meter than the Amazon Rainforest and performing an unclear function in the oceans), and while in the country, she visits with those scientists who are working on eradicating the invasive cane toad (another unintended consequence of someone in the past intervening in nature) and those scientists who are gene-editing mice to try and eradicate their presence in habitats where they don’t belong (rats and mice having followed humans everywhere they’ve travelled, often to the devastation of local species). Kolbert flies all around the continental US, goes to Hawaii and Greenland, and after thusly circling the globe, Kolbert visits with scientists from Climeworks in Iceland — a company she subscribes to that offsets personal carbon footprints by capturing carbon in the air and fixing it in the rock deep underground. What I most appreciated in this book (and what I thought was missing from The Sixth Extinction) was the discussion around the morality of personal behaviour and the ethics of large-scale scientific intervention in nature (and especially when so much of Under a White Sky deals with our current efforts to fix past scientific errors); I remain hopeful that the smart people working on these problems have thought through the consequences.
The strongest argument for gene-editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: What’s the alternative? 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. This is the situation of the Devils Hole pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish, and the Pahrump poolfish, of northern quolls, yellow-spotted monitor lizards, and the Tristan albatross. Stick to a strict interpretation of the natural and these — along with thousands of other species — are goners. The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature but to what end?
Everything about this book was interesting to me and I found it well-written and engaging, but if I had a small complaint, it would be that it feels just a bit unfinished (and as Kolbert writes about research trips that ended up being cancelled due to COVID travel restrictions, this abruptness is understandable). Again, there’s hope to be found here, and that’s no small thing today.
