Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

The New York Times best-selling author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment in Under a White Sky.

That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact.

So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’ s 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 Prize- winning 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 world’s 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 “super coral” 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 10,000- year exercise in defying nature.