Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert: A review

 

The white sky of the title would come about because we have sprayed light-reflective particles into the atmosphere making the blue skies look white and theoretically helping to deflect solar radiation thereby cooling the planet. It's just one of the ideas for geo- or bioengineering that are explored in Elizabeth Kolbert's latest book. Our species has been so successful in modifying the environment that we have become the dominant influence on the natural world and we have named the geological epoch in which we are now living for ourselves. We are living in the Anthropocene and our hubris, it seems, knows no bounds.

Today's scientists are exploring ways to affect the Nature of the future in ways that will correct the damage that we have already done and continue to do to it. Thus, they consider ways to shield the planet from solar heat, control and eradicate invasive species, or direct the flow of rivers in what we consider to be more beneficial or less destructive ways. And all of this is to correct what we have previously done.

A prime example is the Asian carp. The fish was introduced to American waterways in 1963 as a nontoxic way to help clear aquatic weeds. The carp are voracious feeders and in areas, they outcompeted native species until the natives were virtually extirpated. They spread throughout the waterways of the Midwest and up to the Great Lakes. Nearly sixty years later, we are in a battle to clear them out.

The Mississippi River that bisects the country is one of those battlefronts. It has also long been a tinkertoy for the Army Corps of Engineers as they build levees, dredge, and otherwise attempt to direct its flow. Those efforts all too often have had unintended consequences. Just ask New Orleanians.

For me, one of the most fascinating sections of Kolbert's book dealt with the pupfish, rare species of fish endemic to California. There are several distinct species but the Owens pupfish is one of the rarest of the rare and the efforts of scientists and conservationists to protect and preserve the little fish, as related by Kolbert, are nothing short of heroic. I particularly liked the response of one of the scientists who was asked, "What good is a pupfish?" He replied, "What good are you?" Indeed.

Kolbert goes on to discuss the sad history of what we have done and are doing to the coral reefs of the world and of efforts to breed corals that are more resistant to higher temperatures. This is one of those bioengineering projects that hopes to correct or ameliorate the damage we've done. Another is an attempt to essentially breed the invasive cane toads of Australia out of existence. Engrossing stuff.

Kolbert tells all of this in a straightforward way without any alarmist tendencies. She is very good at presenting this timely information in a way that can be absorbed by her readers. At one point, she quotes Horace from 20 B.C.E. He wrote: "Drive out nature though you will with a pitchfork, yet she will always hurry back, and before you know it, will break through your perverse disdain in triumph." Or as a character in a movie once said, "Nature will find a way."

My rating: 4 of 5 stars 

 

Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert: A review

Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change by Elizabeth Kolbert
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
― Upton Sinclair, I, Candidate for Governor: And How I Got Licked

That famous quote from Upton Sinclair seems highly appropriate to any discussion of climate change in this country. Entrenched, very powerful economic interests control our political system and, to a great extent, our media, and those interests are determined that business as usual shall prevail in the production and distribution of energy. In other words, petrochemical companies should be allowed to operate unchecked and unregulated. That this is a recipe for worldwide catastrophe is made quite clear in this slim book by science writer Elizabeth Kolbert.  

Kolbert organizes her narrative as a series of travelogues to various parts of the world where the effects of global warming are made most evident. And so we visit the Alaskan interior, Iceland, and the Greenland ice sheet, as well as the mountains and meadows of Britain and Europe and the jungles of Costa Rica. We also get to meet the researchers in all these places who are working hard to understand the effects of a warming climate.

Kolbert also takes us back to the beginning of the study of climate and climate change in the 19th century where we meet Irish physicist John Tyndall who studied the absorptive properties of various gases and came up with the first accurate account of how the atmosphere functions.

We also meet Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who picked up where Tyndall left off and who later would win the Nobel Prize for his work on electrolytic dissociation. Arrhenius became curious about the effects of carbon dioxide on global temperatures. He was apparently interested in whether falling levels of carbon dioxide might have caused the ice ages. He calculated how the earth's temperature would be affected by changing carbon dioxide levels. He was able to declare that rising levels of carbon dioxide would allow future generations "to live under a warmer sky."

Kolbert reviews some of the cultures that have suffered from or been destroyed by climate change in the past - for example, the classical Mayan civilization of the Yucatan and, even earlier, that of Akkad between the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers.

This is all fascinating stuff for those of us who are interested in this issue, an audience which should include the entire human race. The information is presented in a comprehensive and succinct manner and in highly readable form. Kolbert has a knack for making complicated topics understandable.

The book was first published in 2006 in the middle of the George W. Bush presidency and one of the saddest chapters of the book is entitled "The Day After Kyoto" which begins with a conversation with Bush's Under Secretary of State for Democracy and Global Affairs, Paula Dobriansky. Dobriansky attempts to explain and defend the adminstration's policy on climate change. What she actually does is repeat the same talking point over and over again.

Indeed, the history of the United States' handling of the problem of global warming has been mostly downhill since President George H.W. Bush acknowledged the problem and signed the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. It has mostly been a history of denial of basic science and a refusal to act or to lead, as perhaps best exemplified by climate change denialist Sen. James Inhofe of Oklahoma.

In an afterword written in January 2009, Kolbert makes clear that business as usual continues and without U.S. leadership the problem of climate change cannot be solved. It seems unlikely that that will happen in the foreseeable future. The warnings of scientists like James Hansen continue to go unheeded and Earth continues to heat up. I finished this book feeling very depressed about the future prospects for survival of the human race.      

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The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert: A review

The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History by Elizabeth Kolbert
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

"In pushing other species to extinction, humanity is busy sawing off the limb on which it perches."
                                 - Stanford ecologist Paul Ehrlich

As far as science has been able to determine, there have been five mass extinctions of life on Earth in the history of our planet. The first of these occurred at the end of the Ordovician period of the Paleozoic era about 450 million years ago. The second occurred less than 100 million years later in the late Devonian period. There followed the End-Permian extinction of some 250 million years ago, the Late Triassic extinction of 200 million years ago, and finally, the last one and the one we are most familiar with, the End-Cretaceous extinction which occurred about 65 million years ago. That's the one that wiped out the dinosaurs. (Well, almost - except for the ancestors of birds.)

The best evidence seems to indicate that all of these extinctions except for the last one were the result of climatological events, often relatively sudden events to which plants and animals did not have time to adapt. The cause of the fifth one was also a change in climate but it was brought about by a collision with an asteroid. That cataclysmic event so altered the climate of the planet for a time that many, many species died out either suddenly or over a period of years.

Scientists believe that we are now in the midst of the sixth extinction which Earth has endured and that this extinction is entirely human-caused. Elizabeth Kolbert writes in this book about how our species has altered life on the planet as no other species has before. It's not just that we are changing the climate for the worse, although that certainly is a big part of it, we also have altered the face of Earth and the chemistry of the oceans to the detriment of very many species.

One of the biggest problems that we have created for other species is simply the fact that we move everything around and wherever we go on Earth, it seems that some species hitch a ride with us. So a species from Asia that would never under normal circumstances make it to the Americas is brought here either wittingly or unwittingly and it wreaks havoc. Kolbert points out that the most endangered family of animals on Earth today are the amphibians. They are being wiped out by a fungus that has been spread around the world by humans.

Kolbert writes about a dozen species, some of them already irrevocably lost and others on their way out. Through these very personal stories of that wonderful bird the Great Auk, the Panamanian golden frog, staghorn coral, the Sumatran rhino and others, the reader is moved to begin to understand the enormity of what is happening. What we are causing to happen to our world.  

It all reminds me a bit of another subject that I wrote about here recently - the nihilistic ramblings of Rust Cohle, one of the detectives on the HBO series, "True Detective." At one point, he delivers this soliloquy:

I think human consciousness is a tragic misstep in evolution. We became too self-aware, nature created an aspect of nature separate from itself, we are creatures that should not exist by natural law. We are things that labor under the illusion of having a self; an accretion of sensory, experience and feeling, programmed with total assurance that we are each somebody, when in fact everybody is nobody. Maybe the honorable thing for our species to do is deny our programming, stop reproducing, walk hand in hand into extinction, one last midnight, brothers and sisters opting out of a raw deal.

Reading Kolbert's book is enough to make one think that perhaps Cohle is on to something there.

It is somewhat surprising to learn that the concept of extinction is not a very old one. Kolbert points out that it was first articulated by Georges Cuvier in the revolutionary Paris of the 18th century. As always it seems, with any new scientific idea or concept, it took a while for it to be accepted, but later work by paleontologists has confirmed Cuvier's findings.

This is a well-written book which can popularize scientific concepts and principles for a mass audience. It is an easy read and a fairly short one at less than 300 pages. Kolbert includes extensive notes and bibliography for those who wish to read more on the subject.


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(Update: There is an interesting article entitled "The Mammoth Cometh" in The New York Times Magazine today about the effort to recreate some extinct animals through cloning.)