By John Schwartz/Undark
Elizabeth Kolbert lives her stories. In the course of reporting her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, she got hit by a leaping carp near Ottawa, Illinois (“It felt like someone had slammed me in the shin with a Wiffle-ball bat”) and visited tiny endangered pupfish at Devils Hole, a small pool in a cave near Pahrump, Nevada. She got her socks wet walking across a mockup of the Lower Mississippi in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, and watched corals reefs spawn at an ocean simulator in Australia.
With her lively, vivid writing, Kolbert is one of the nation’s most high-profile science writers. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2014 book The Sixth Extinction made the disappearance of species understandable and urgent. She writes for the New Yorker, where portions of Under a White Sky first appeared. But even if some of it was familiar to me – both as a reader of the New Yorker and as a science writer who covers some of the same topics myself – I wanted to read it through, to see these pieces come together into an overarching argument.
In each of these trips, she tells of disaster – of invasive species and endangered ones, of coral bleaching, of the rapid land loss in south Louisiana. Disasters caused by us. The thought at the center of this wonderful book is that not only do we humans do a lot of damage to the planet, some of the worst damage we do occurs when we’re trying to fix things. As she puts it, this is a book “about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”
Posted on February 27, 2021