UNDER A WHITE SKY: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert (2021)
Under a White Sky is an informative, readable book, which I recommend.
It is a book about people tampering with the environment to counteract damage done by previous tampering with the environment.
These people risk unintended consequences in order to undo previous unintended consequences.
This is unavoidable, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote. There’s no state of unspoiled nature to get back to. Doing nothing is an option, but it is not a good option. The best that can be hoped for is to minimize previous damage.
Her first example is the ongoing struggle to keep Asian Carp, an invasive species, from jumping from the Mississippi Valley watershed to the Great Lakes Basin.
Introduction of Asian Carp (four different species) into the North American environment was actually a suggestion by the great environmentalist Rachel Carson.
She thought the carp would be a good alternative to pesticides to control the growth of aquatic weeds and algae. Aquatic weeds were choking some rivers so badly that not only boats, but swimmers, were unable to get through them.
Asian Carp accomplished their intended purpose. The carp ate up the weeds, but they also ate up and crowded out native fish, mussels and other water life.
On the Illinois River, Asian Carp are nearly two-thirds of estimated fish biomass, Kolbert wrote; on other tributaries, the proportion is even higher.
She wrote that one species can grow to more than 80 pounds, eat half its weight in a day and lay hundreds of thousands of eggs. Another species can grow to 100 pounds.
There is an ongoing struggle to keep the carp out of the Great Lakes Basin, which is connected with the Mississippi watershed by means of the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, which was originally constructed to divert sewage and other pollution away from Chicago beaches.
The canal was originally so polluted that it was toxic to fish. But thanks to the Clean Waters Act and the work of Friends of the Chicago River, it is now possible for the Asian Carp to survive.
The carp are held back by massive fishing, which can yield literally tons of carp in a few days, and by an electrified fence on the Chicago River.
The irony of all this is obvious, but Kolbert does not criticize Rachel Carson or the diggers of the Chicago and Ship Canal. They did the best they could on the basis of what they knew. This is life. This is the human condition.
Some more examples:
- Construction of levees and dams on the Mississippi Delta in southern Louisiana, which protects New Orleans and certain other areas from the effects of floods and land subsidence, but accelerates the destruction of land inhabited by marginal people – many of them Cajuns and Indians – whose needs are sacrificed.
- An attempt to preserve pupfish, an endangered species found in an underground lake in the Mojave Desert, by constructing a completely artificial environment.
- Genetic engineering of the cane toad, an invasive species whose bite is toxic to humans and flesh is toxic to wildlife, and which is spreading like wildfire in Australia.
- “Accelerated evolution” to save the Great Barrier Reef of Australia and other forms of coral.
Coral is a form of life that excretes calcium carbonate that makes up coral reefs. Coral is gendered. It reproduces by discharging sperm and eggs into the water, with a possibility that some will meet and mate before they become fish food.
Oceans are growing hotter and more acidic and this kills most coral, but some of the more hardy ones survive and try to reproduce. Researchers at the National Sea Simulator in Australia college coral sperm and eggs, mate them in buckets and release them into the wild.
But nobody expects the Great Barrier Reef to be restored in all its glory. The most that they hope for, according to Kolbert, is a kind of Okay Barrier Reef.
All this is a buildup to the last part of the book, which is about the possibility of geo-engineering to slow down or stop climate change.
The title of the book, Under a White Sky, refers to one such proposal. Diamond dust would scatter the sun’s light, which would reduce the greenhouse effect. If done on a large scale, it would make the sky white instead of blue.
Other climate engineers think sulfur dioxide or calcium carbonate would work better. New types of aircraft would need to be designed to scatter the material in sufficient quantities.
The problem with all that, Kolbert noted, is that, even barring the unexpected, the scattering of dust would have to be a continuing effort. It would not stop the accumulation of greenhouse gasses in the atmosphere. If the scattering ever stopped, things would be worse than before.
A better solution would be to capture the carbon emissions from energy plants or to pull carbon dioxide from the air. Kolbert profiled companies that actually do this.
The problems with this are (1) capturing carbon takes energy, which has to come from somewhere, (2) suitable underground storage sites for the captured carbon are hard to find and (3) nobody has yet done this on a large scale.
Advocates of such schemes are not techno-optimists, Kolbert wrote. Rather they are techno-fatalists, who see themselves as proposing desperate measures in an emergency situation.
I myself believe it is too late to reverse or even halt the rise in temperatures world-wide. It would require political and lifestyle changes and a reduction in consumption, especially in rich countries, that is not politically feasible.
What is likely to happen is that things will grow continually worse until conditions can no longer be ignored, even by the well-off, and action can no longer be delayed. Then there will be “all of the above” gambles which, even if they succeed, will leave our inheritors with a planet with a worse environment and fewer resources for human life than it has now
Also, take note that Kolbert’s book is about the dilemmas of people who are intelligent and well-meaning Not everyone whose decisions affect climate policy is intelligent, and not every one of them is well-meaning.
LINKS
Book Review: Under a White Sky by Mickey Friedman for the Berkshire Edge.
Under a White Sky: a Review by Chris Gregory on his blog.
Book Review: Under a White Sky by Tristran Bove for Earth.org.
Under a White Sky review – the path to catastrophe by Ben Ehrenreich for The Guardian.
Phil Ebersole's Blog 
March 28, 2024 at 8:51 pm |
Humans suck at long range planning, Always have, always will, We need a genuine ass kicking crisis to get in gear. To many people, the climate “crisis” doesn’t feel like a crisis at all. Too much slow motion. Too easy to go into denial because it is inconvenient or it doesn’t fit their ideology.
Think about how many people went into denial about COVID. Millions of people dead or disabled and there are still tens of millions who deny there was a crisis. I consider it a triumph of “motivated reasoning.”
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March 31, 2024 at 7:21 am |
There isn’t a damn thing we can do about any of this.
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