This was a difficult genre for me, but i learned a lot about how people are destroying the natural world in attempt to create more!

This book is amazing and important. I am so glad I had the chance to read it. I find Kolbert's writing to be accessible, vibrant, and honest. It's not the kind of book you forget.

I loved The Sixth Extinction so I was very excited to read this. Composed of various unique stories, Kolbert illustrates the successes and failures of human attempts to reverse the environmental impact of the modern world. Insightful and interesting.

Really beautifully written and artful, even when the content (having as it all does to do with climate change) makes you panic.

Even more important as we experience what climate change is affecting life for everyone on the planet: wildfires, rising tempatures, droughts. How humans and hubris about their enivonment creates a collision course.

Listen to my interview and read the show notes: https://www.writersvoice.net/2021/03/elizabeth-kolbert-under-a-white-sky-ian-shive-the-last-unknown/

I loved this book. It was at once infuriating and inspirational, disappointing, and hopeful. Infuriating because of the damage humanity has done to the Earth's environment, but nspirational because of those who spend every day working to fix that damage. Disappointing that every solution has its own, possibly worse consequences, hopeful because even one success can lead to more.
Elizabeth Kolbert rightly won the Pulitzer for her last book (Sixth Extinction - of you haven't read it, you should) and with this book, is well on her way to another. To research this book, Kolbert traveled around the world to where scientists are doing the engineering and physicians the negotiations to try and, if not reverse the damage humans have done, at least to mitigate that damage.
My favorite quote from this book, while lengthy, shows well why the political side of this can be so complicated:
"Since carbon emissions are cumulative, those most to blame for climate change are those who’ve emitted the most over time. With just four percent of the world’s population, the United States is responsible for almost thirty percent of aggregate emissions. The countries of the European Union, with about seven percent of the globe’s population, have produced about twenty-two percent of aggregate emissions. For China, home to roughly eighteen percent of the globe’s population, the figure is thirteen percent.
India, which is expected soon to overtake China as the world’s most populous nation, is responsible for about three percent. All the nations of Africa and all the nations of South America put together are responsible for less than six percent.
To get to zero, everyone would have to stop emitting—not only Americans and Europeans and Chinese, but also Indians and Africans and South Americans. But asking countries that have contributed almost nothing to the problem to swear off carbon because other countries have already produced way, way too much of it is grossly unfair. It’s also geopolitically untenable. For this reason, international climate agreements have always been based on the premise of “common but differentiated responsibilities.” Under the Paris accord, developed countries are supposed to “lead by undertaking economy-wide absolute emission reduction targets,” while developing countries are called on, more hazily, to enhance their “mitigation efforts.”"

The road to saving our place on our planet will be long. But, thanks to the work of those highlighted by Kolbert, I am a little more hopeful that there will be a recognizable world for my kids to grow old in.

Thank you to the publisher and Netgalley for the opportunity to read a pre-release copy of this book.

This book is superb. Kolbert does an excellent job of educating without preaching. She highlights the dilemmas facing today's environmentalist movement -- the Earth can never be what it was, so how do we use technology to make it close to what we want?

Find my featured, full-length review and bonus "Beyond the Book" essay at www.bookbrowse.com in April 2021.

“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.”

Kolbert burst onto the scene with the Pulitzer Prize winning The Sixth Extinction. A book I enjoyed immensely. She has returned here with a collection of eight essays, exploring the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world and how scientists and biologists are fighting back. These very inventive measures may only slow the bleeding but it is at least a start. Kolbert traveled the world for these stories and did not mind getting her hands dirty along the way. It must be tough to be a science writer in 2021 but she has pulled it off once again, with this eye-opener.

Scientifically incisive and beautifully written, as we always expect from Kolbert. But while the sketches of different Anthropocene inflection points point the way towards a larger discussion about the ever-increasing necessity of some kind of climate change mitigation efforts (something that few popular writers in her field seem to be grappling with yet), she does not quite build it into a convincing argument. At the same time, it makes for a bracing dose of cold realism regarding the shrinking options available for humanity to avoid total disaster, especially when read in conjunction with Kim Stanley Robinson's "The Ministry for the Future".

Elizabeth Kolbert is a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker and the author of the Pulitzer-winning book, The Sixth Extinction and in this book, she talks about a number of human-created issues and what certain scientists are trying to do about them.

Climate change is discussed toward the end of the book, but it's hardly the main focus. She talks about a wide variety of topics in the book, such as an invasive species of carp that people are trying to keep out of the great lakes. She discusses how, partially because of flood mitigation, large parts of Southern Louisiana is actually causing the area to shrink. There’s a chapter focused on an entirely conservation-dependent species of desert fish, two on genetic experimentation: one involves trying to breed a more heat-tolerant coral reef, and one talks about using technology to manipulate the genes of invasive species. And then finally, the last section talks about some pretty radical ideas people have to combat climate change.

That’s pretty much the structure of this entire book. There’s no introduction, she just goes right into it. I appreciate that there wasn't an extensive nod to the COVID-19 situation that so many nonfiction books seem to have these days. She mentions the pandemic toward the end, but very briefly. Her thumbprint really isn’t in this book, except for the fact that it’s all over her writing - precisely where it should be.

There’s a command she has over the storytelling that’s hard to describe - it just feels solid and trimmed of all the fat. It’s a rather short book and it zooms by - there are no tangents or digressions, just concise stories of these people, with her humor and sharp eye thrown in. I appreciated this book so much for that. It’s why, even though I liked the new Bill Gates book, I liked this book more. It doesn’t feel like she’s forcing a smile on her face as she discusses the issue - it’s as gloomy as it needs to be, without being excessively so.

Kolbert pulls no punches. I highlighted so many passages in this book that knocked the wind out of me. By trimming the fat, her words are so much more potent. It’s good writing from a practiced hand. I don’t have any criticisms of the book. It gets in there, does what it wants to do, then gets out. No frills, just a really great book with tons of interesting information.

Lovely book on nature and the threat of global warming. Honestly this book had such an interesting take one that I’ve completely never seen before and print. I would highly recommend it to anyone who’s interested in the environment on any level. Also with regard to the prose, it’s absolutely beautifully written.

“This book [is] a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”

Put another way, Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky (published today) is about people desperately seeking solutions to the problems that we humans have created, such as habitat loss, species extinction, and especially, the biggest problem of all: climate change. It’s fascinating and it’s chilling.

Divided into three sections—Down the River, Into the Wild, and Up in the Air—Under a White Sky looks at an escalating series of issues and the increasingly extreme interventions scientists are coming up with to try to address these problems.

Starting with introduced species in the Chicago River, moving on to erosion around New Orleans, and then to the Great Barrier Reef, Kolbert quickly ups the scale, both of space and time, of the issues we are considering. By the time we get to the final chapter, we are looking at what ice in Greenland can tell us about Ice Ages and interventions such as “assisted evolution” (genetically modifying species to handle the changing conditions better) and “climate engineering” (blasting reflective crystals into the atmosphere to reduce the sun’s warming).

While this could sound overwhelming—and it is on an emotional level—Kolbert is a gifted writer who is able to turn these big concepts into human-sized stories and what might seem like far-fetched ideas into realistic inquiry. She travels to a variety of places (USA, Greenland, Switzerland, Australia, Iceland) to meet scientists and see them at work. It’s an amazing look into the scientific process and the creativity needed to address climate change.

I was completely drawn into Under a White Sky and flew through it. Kolbert’s writing is accessible and her story-telling keeps you interested. She builds up the layers of information so that by the time she gets to the grandest proposals, we’re ready to see how they’re all connected and at least some of them are going to probably be necessary.

Under a White Sky covers similar ground to some other books I’ve read, notably Dan Egan’s The Death and Life of the Great Lakes and Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything. Indeed, it would make an excellent companion read to Klein’s book as it somewhat picks up where Klein leaves off.

And while there’s a temptation to feel like maybe everyone should just stop meddling altogether and we just need to focus on reducing our use, Kolbert explains that it really isn’t one or the other but rather both that are needed. As she says, the solutions these scientists are trying to come up with “weren’t improvements on the originals; they were the best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances.”

Thanks to NetGalley and Crown Publishing for this eARC in exchange for an honest review.

I could only make it 1/3 of the way through this. It just did not capture my attention. I wanted to be drawn in and learn but it was just too boring.

I was lucky enough to win an ARC of UNDER A WHITE SKY through a Shelf Awareness giveaway. Thank you for the early look, and I hope you have a safe and happy New Year!

I have a friend who’s 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, my friend 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 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; interesting, engaging, and well-written, shouls have wide appeal.