Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“One year after Silent Spring’s publication, in 1963, the US Fish and Wildlife Service brought the first documented shipment of Asian carp to America. The idea was to use the carp, much as Carson had recommended, to keep aquatic weeds in check. (Weeds like Eurasian watermilfoil—another introduced species—can clog lakes and ponds so thoroughly that boats or even swimmers can’t get through.) The fish were baby grass carp—‘fingerlings’—and they were raised at the agency’s Fish Farming Experimental Station in Stuttgart, Arkansas. Three years later, biologists at the station succeeded in getting one of the carp—now grown—to spawn. Thousands more fingerlings resulted. Pretty much immediately, some escaped.”

Kolbert explores that Asian carp in the Mississippi are now threatening the Great Lakes, prompting measures such as the use of electric barriers on the Chicago River to prevent the fish’s passage. This problem is manmade: Asian carp were introduced as biocontrol, a deliberate attempt to curb other invasive species. Initially seen as a preferable alternative to the use of chemicals, they ultimately became a bigger problem than the one they were introduced to solve—a fact that highlights one of the book’s themes, that of the unintended consequences of attempts to modify nature.

“The cakes he’d brought to CarpFest had been made from fish caught in Louisiana. These had been frozen and shipped to Ho Chi Minh City. There, Parola related, the carp had been thawed, processed, vacuum-packed, refrozen, and put on another container ship, bound for New Orleans. In a concession to Americans’ anti-carp prejudice, he’d rechristened the fish ‘silverfin,’ a term he’d had trademarked.”

Some of the numerous measures to control Asian carp include fishing tournaments that attempt to make carp into a food fish (a plausible option, given that it is eaten by people in its native habitat, China). Carp have a bad reputation due to their negative impacts on ecosystems in the United States, leading to their rebranding as “silverfin.” This passage underscores how difficult it is to mitigate environmental harms; while the carp were taken out of the water, protecting the Great Lakes ecosystem, they were also shipped halfway around the world and back in order to be sold—a process with its own environmental consequences.

“One year after its founding, L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orleans suffered its first inundation. ‘The site is drowned under half a foot of water,’ Bienville wrote. The settlement would remain submerged for six months. Rather than retreat again, the French dug in. They raised artificial levees atop the natural ones and started cutting drainage channels through the muck. Most of this backbreaking labor was performed by African slaves. By the 1730s, slave-built levees stretched along both banks of the Mississippi for a distance of nearly fifty miles.”

The inequitable distribution of environmental harms is one of this book’s main themes. Here, inequities feed into environmental harms. The forced labor of enslaved Africans created levees along the Mississippi—levees that would restrict the flow of sediment through the landscape, causing Louisiana’s problems with land loss and sea level rise. This passage also points to another form of inequity—before the Europeans arrived, local Indigenous people would move to accommodate the river’s periodic flooding. Europeans not only displaced Native Americans from the land, but also ignored the wisdom of their approach to living with the river.

“As I wandered past empty homes plastered with NO TRESPASSING signs, I could see the economic logic of the island’s ‘planned deconstruction.’ At the same time, the injustice was pretty glaring. The Biloxi and the Choctaw had come to Louisiana after they’d been dispossessed of ancestral lands, further east. The Isle de Jean Charles Band had been able to live peacefully on the island only because it was too isolated and commercially irrelevant for anyone else to take an interest in. The band had had no say in the dredging of the oil channels or in the layout of the Morganza to the Gulf project. They’d been excluded from the efforts to control the Mississippi, and now the new forms of control were being imposed to counter the effects of the old, they were being excluded from those, too.”

For residents of Isle de Jean Charles, in Terrebonne parish, Louisiana, relocation will be inescapable due to land loss from flood control on the Mississippi River, sea level rise from climate change, and the digging of canals through the marsh by the oil industry. This situation reflects the inequitable distribution of environmental harms; residents of this island, most of whom are Indigenous, have lost or are losing their home—which they were forced onto by earlier injustices, such as displacement by European settlers—due to decisions in which they played no part. The fact that the tribe has no say in decisions about measures to counter the effects of past mistakes shows how the inequities built into past environmental harms make future decisions about the control of nature unjust as well.

“McPhee included ‘Atchafalaya’ in his book the Control of Nature, published in 1989. Since then, a lot has happened to complicate the meaning on ‘control,’ not to mention ‘nature.’ The Louisiana delta is now often referred to by hydrologists as a ‘coupled human and natural system,’ or, for short, a CHANS. It’s an ugly term—another nomenclatural hairball—but there’s no simple way to talk about the tangle we’ve created. A Mississippi that’s been harnessed, straightened, regularized, and shackled can still exert a godlike force; it’s no longer exactly a river, though. It’s hard to say who occupies Mount Olympus these days, if anyone.”

A project on the Mississippi River complicates our understanding of nature. Roughly 500 years ago, the Mississippi changed its course until it came into contact with the Atchafalaya; for centuries, a logjam prevented the former river from following the latter’s course, but when that barrier was removed, the Mississippi threatened to follow the Atchafalaya’s course, which would have left the industries along the Mississippi (including refineries, container ports and petrochemical plants)useless. In response, the US Army Corps of Engineers built a massive barrier known as the Auxiliary Structure. Such extensive control measures have created a system that is neither fully natural nor fully human—like much of the planet in the 21st century.

“In the twentieth century, the biodiversity crisis, as it eventually came to be known, only sped up. Extinction rates are now hundreds—perhaps thousands—of times higher than the so-called background rates that applied over most of geological time. The losses extend across all continents, all oceans, and all taxa. Along with the species formally categorized as endangered, countless others are headed in that direction.”

In the Anthropocene, people are causing mass extinctions on a scale that’s unprecedented not only in human history, but also in the history of the planet. There are some parallels—there have been five mass extinction events in the history of life on earth—but the extinction crisis of the Anthropocene is the first to be caused by people. This process goes back millennia, to Paleolithic times, when people were responsible for the extinction of animals like woolly mammoths and mastodons, but has accelerated in the 20th and 21st centuries to the point that the biodiversity crisis is on par with the crisis that is being caused by climate change.

“In an effort to keep the beetles’ numbers in check, the staff had started setting traps for them. Emptying the traps involved sifting their contents through a fine mesh and then picking out each tiny insect with tweezers or a pipette. For an hour or so, I watched two staff members bent over this task, which had to be repeated every day. I was struck, and not for the first time, how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.”

An exact facsimile of the original Devils Hole cavern, replicated from laser images, was created to preserve a reserve population of the Devils Hole pupfish, a critically endangered species that lives in a cavern in Nevada. However, there is no easy way to replicate nature. In the fake cavern, a beetle that had not posed a threat to the pupfish in the wild began attacking them, necessitating careful intervention from the scientists. Ecosystems that, if left undisturbed, would have functioned fine on their own, now require constant monitoring to maintain.

“Pister collected all the Owens pupfish left at Fish Slough, with the intention of moving them to a nearby spring. They fit into two buckets.

‘I distinctly remember being scared to death,’ he would later write. ‘I had walked perhaps fifty yards when I realized that I literally held within my hands the existence of an entire vertebrate species.’ Pister spent the next several decades working to save the Owens pupfish and also the Devils Hole pupfish. People would often ask him why he spent so much time on such insignificant animas.

‘What good are pupfish?’ they’d demand.

‘What good are you?’ Pister would respond.”

The current biodiversity crisis differs from past mass extinction events. In the past, there were no human beings yet in existence to bear witness (or responsibility), while the current crisis is due to people. Scientists resisting the trajectory, out of a love for other beings, include people like biologist Phil Pister, who recognized a species of pupfish by carrying them from their original location in two buckets. Pister’s response to being asked about the point of pupfish shows the practical and moral risks of the biodiversity crisis: While people may not understand the full implications of species disappearing from ecosystems; it is clear that humans do not have the moral right to perpetrate so many extinctions.

“Gates was so charismatic that even though I’d come to Moku o Lo’e with a notebook full of doubts, I felt inspired by her. A couple of times, after she had finished for the day at the institute, we went out for dinner, and eventually we talked our way past the relationship of a reporter and her subject to something approaching friendship. I was arranging to visit Gates again, to see how super corals were coming along, when she wrote to tell me she was dying. Only she didn’t put it that way. Instead, she said that she had lesions on her brain, and she was going to Mexico for treatment, and that, whatever the disease was, she was going to beat it.”

Kolbert positions herself in the text not simply as a reporter, but also a character impacted by the people and phenomena she encounters. In this case, she acknowledges that her relationship to coral biologist Ruth Gates was not purely objective. Rather, the women became friends—an acknowledgment of complexity that gives us a window into Kolbert as a journalist and as a person. This description also casts a light on Gates’s project—the assisted evolution of coral, a last-ditch and innovative attempt to protect coral from warming and acidifying oceans. By describing Gates as an optimist, Kolbert is giving us a sense of the scale of the challenge facing corals—as one only an optimist would be willing to take on.

“Like Ruth Gates, Charles Darwin was confounded by coral. His first encounter with a reef was in 1835. He was sailing on the Beagle from the Galapagos to Tahiti when, from the ship’s deck, he spied ‘curious rings of coral land’ sticking out of the open sea—what today would be called atolls. Darwin knew that corals were animals and that reefs were their handiwork. Still, the formations baffled him. ‘These low hollow coral islands bear no proportion to the vast ocean out of which they abruptly rise,’ he wrote. How, he wondered, was such an arrangement possible?”

At the same time as Darwin was publishing early versions of his theory of evolution—which revolutionized science, not to mention humanity’s understanding of itself—he released a monograph on reefs, in which he proposed a theory about how corals could appear on the ocean’s surface (his hypothesis was correct—corals attach themselves to the sides of extinct volcanoes and grow toward the light). Kolbert often uses history to illustrate her arguments; here she draws a link between corals and the theory of evolution. Now, the connection is a much more direct one: In order to preserve corals from the effects of climate change, researchers are breeding corals that can withstand the conditions of the oceans of the future—a process they’re calling assisted evolution.

“As far as Van Oppen and her team were concerned, no member of the reef community was too small to potentially make a difference. Some bacteria associated with corals seem particularly adept at scavenging oxygen radicals; one idea the group was exploring was whether it might be possible, by administering some sort of marine probiotic, to make reefs more bleaching-resistant.”

Throughout the book, Kolbert intersperses historical descriptions and passages explaining scientific research with vignettes of researchers conducting that science. In this case, Kolbert describes a visit to the lab of researcher Madeleine van Oppen, who is working on assisted evolution in corals—specifically, by making corals resistant to bleaching, in which corals exposed to heat stress expel symbionts, tiny plants that live in their cells. Ideas about possible ways of making that evolution happen are numerous, though the number that could actually help coral survive is far smaller.

“Since no one knows how many creatures depend on reefs, no one can say how many would be threatened by their collapse; clearly, though, the number is enormous. It’s estimated that one out of every four creatures in the oceans spends at least part of its life on a reef. According to Roger Bradbury, an ecologist at Australian National University, were these structures to disappear, the seas would look a lot like they did in Precambrian times, more than five hundred million years ago, before crustaceans had even evolved. ‘It will be slimy,’ he has observed.”

Kolbert establishes the stakes for the potential collapse of coral reefs. Coral reefs are vulnerable to changes in the ocean that are a result of climate change. Losing them would have incalculable consequences, as reefs are the most biodiverse environments on the planet. By exploring the consequences of coral death, Kolbert examines one particular impact of the broader planetary biodiversity crisis, explaining not just that biodiversity loss is happening, but how it is happening. This discussion also increases the sense of urgency for the kinds of solutions discussed in this chapter, to breed corals that are more resilient to changing ocean conditions. Finally, by discussing an epoch millions of years ago, Kolbert highlights the connection between the present biodiversity crisis and past mass extinction events.

“Anyway, according to Tizard, it’s too late in the day to be worried about a few genes here and there. ‘If you look at a native Australian environment, you see eucalyptus trees, koalas, kookaburras, whatever,’ he said. ‘If I look at it, as a scientist, what I’m seeing is multiple copies of the eucalyptus genome, multiple copies of the koala genome, and so on. And these genomes are interacting with each other. Then, all of a sudden, ploomph, you put an additional genome in there—the cane toad genome. It was never there before, and its interaction with all these other genomes is catastrophic. It takes other genomes out completely.

‘What people are not seeing is that this is already a genetically modified environment,’ he went on. Invasive species alter the environment by adding entire genomes that don’t belong. Genetic engineers, by contrast, alter just a few bits of DNA here and there.”

While gene editing technology offers a chance to mitigate the effects of invasive species, there are practical and moral implications for using it, though researchers like Mark Tizard believe these concerns are misguided. Their dismissal of this skepticism is one of the themes of the book—the self-perpetuating need for the control of nature. On a planet as heavily modified as ours, increasingly invasive and precise tools are needed to counter the effects of past modifications. Kolbert deploys a journalistic narrative strategy, representing different sides of scientific and moral debates through the voices and viewpoints of the people she interviews.

“Since the 1960s, it’s been a dream of biologists to exploit the power of gene drives—to drive the drive, as it were. This dream has now been realized, and then some, thanks to CRISPR. In bacteria, which might be said to hold the original patent on the technology, CRISPR functions as an immune system. Bacteria that possess a ‘CRISPR locus’ can incorporate snippets of DNA from viruses into their own genomes. They use these snippets, like mug shots, to recognize potential assailants. Then they dispatch CRISPR-associated, or Cas, enzymes, which work like tiny knives. The enzymes slice the invaders’ DNA at critical locations, thus disabling them.”

CRISPR is a gene editing technology that makes it possible to easily manipulate DNA, allowing scientists to exploit the natural potential of some genes to manipulate inheritance so that they’re handed down more than half the time. This could allow an unwanted organism to be modified in such a way that it would produce unfertilizable eggs, for example, thus wiping out its population. By explaining this highly technical process colloquially—referring to elements as “mug shots” and “tiny knives”—Kolbert showcases her ability to describe complex phenomena in easily understandable ways.

“In a world of synthetic gene drives, the border between the human and the natural, between the laboratory and the wild, already deeply blurred, all but dissolves. In such a world, not only do people determine the conditions under which evolution is taking place, people can—again, in principle—determine the outcome.”

Gene drives represent an even more extensive modification of nature than the assisted evolution of corals, putting gene drives on the same scale as other large-scale modifications, such as the restructuring of the Mississippi River that has blurred the boundary between natural and artificial systems in Louisiana. Given the unintended past consequences of these other attempts at planetary modification, however, it’s possible that gene drives, while representing a greater level of control, could have unforeseen implications.

“The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what’s the alternative? Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn’t going to bring nature back. The choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing. This is the situation of the Devils Hole pupfish, the Shoshone pupfish, and the Pahrump poolfish, of the northern quoll, the Campbell Island teal, and the Tristan albatross. Stick to a strict interpretation of the natural and these—along with thousands of other species—are goners.”

While some species are thriving alongside humanity, many more are not, leading to a biodiversity crisis. This crisis is sometimes precipitated by habitat loss, as in the case of pupfish, or by invasive species, as with the northern quoll and Campbell Island teal. Gene editing technology could help mitigate the latter. Though such technology also has risks, the certain damage invasive species cause may tip the scales in their favor.

“When, exactly, people began altering the atmosphere is a matter of debate. According to one theory, the process got under way eight or nine thousand years ago, before the dawn of recorded history, when wheat was domesticated in the Middle East and rice in Asia. Early farmers set to clearing land for agriculture, and as they chopped and burned their way through the forests, carbon dioxide was released. The quantities involved were comparatively small, but, according to advocates of this theory, known as the ‘early Anthropocene hypothesis,; the effect was fortuitous. Owing to natural cycles, CO2 levels should have been falling during this period. Human intervention kept them more or less constant.”

Human-caused climate change has a long history. Most scientists date the beginning of anthropogenic climate change at the invention of the steam engine in the 18th century. Yet by considering this earlier timeline, Kolbert is underscoring humanity’s extensive impact on the planet. Either way, with 40 billion tons of carbon dioxide now being released into the atmosphere through the burning of fossil fuels and ongoing deforestation, the planet’s climate is changing in ways that could prove catastrophic.

“The way Lackner sees things, the key to avoiding ‘deep trouble’ is thinking differently. ‘We need to change the paradigm,’ he told me. Carbon dioxide, in his view, should be regarded much the same way we look at sewage. We don’t expect people to stop producing waste. ‘Rewarding people for going to the bathroom less would be nonsensical,; Lackner has observed. At the same time, we don’t let them shit on the sidewalk. One of the reasons we’ve had such trouble addressing the carbon problem, he contends, is the issue has acquired an ethical charge. To the extent that emissions are seen as bad, emitters become guilty.”

Negative emissions technology promises to pull carbon dioxide from the atmosphere, offering us the ability to enjoy the benefits of modern life, which often produces emissions, without contributing to climate change. German physicist Klaus Lackner was an early pioneer of negative emissions technology after realizing fossil fuels weren’t going to disappear anytime soon. As Lackner says, such tools seem crazy, but are necessary to avoid bigger problems and to offer a realistic strategy for containing climate change in a world in which many people still depend on fossil fuels.

“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.’”

responsibility for causing climate change. Rich countries have contributed more than their share of the global emissions, while poorer ones, who have contributed very little, will nonetheless need to share the burden of switching off fossil fuels to avoid catastrophic climate change. This situation is in line with the theme of the inequitable distribution of environmental harm—countries that have not benefitted fully from fossil fuels need to forgo future benefits—and is also a problem for coordinated global action. That makes negative emissions technologies and solar geoengineering all the more important.

“In the 1960s, climate-and weather-control proposals were all the rage, both in the United States and in the USSR. Project Stormfury, a collaboration between the US Navy and the Weather Bureau, targeted hurricanes. These, it was believed, could be weakened by sending aircraft to seed the clouds around the eyewall with silver iodide. Operation Popeye, a secret weather-modification scheme run by the Air Force during the Vietnam War, was supposed to increase rainfall over the Ho Chi Ming Trail, once again by seeding clouds with silver iodide. An astonishing twenty-six hundred seeding sorties were flown by the 54th Weather Reconnaissance Squadron before Popeye was exposed in The Washington Post and shut down.”

The US government has long known about the existence of climate change, and the risks posed by burning fossil fuels. This prompted researchers to suggest spreading reflective particles in the atmosphere—similar to 21st century solar geoengineering—rather than reducing fossil fuel use. Other weather modification projects were also being investigated. This passage highlights one of the risks of atmospheric alteration projects: They sap the urgency from attempts to get off fossil fuels, as they offer alternative ways to control global temperatures. By positioning modern solar geoengineering projects alongside historic examples, Kolbert also underscores the potential pitfalls and hubris of 21st century attempts to alter the weather.

“The more particles injected into the stratosphere, the greater the chance of weird side effects. Researchers who looked into using solar geoengineering to offset carbon dioxide levels of five hundred and sixty parts per million—levels that could easily be reached later this century—determined it would change the appearance of the sky. White would become the new blue. The effect, they noted, would cause ‘the sky over formerly pristine areas to look similar to the sky over urban areas.’ Another, more felicitous result, they observed, would be glorious sunsets, “similar to those seen after large volcanic eruptions.”

While solar geoengineering offers a fast and relatively low-cost way of controlling global temperatures, it’s replete with practical and ethical problems, which illustrates the theme of the unintended consequences of modifying nature. The Geoengineering Model Intercomparison Project keeps a list of concerns, ranging from a white sky, to more brilliant sunsets, to conflicts between countries, and to drought over Africa and Asia. This quote also highlights another theme of the book: Solar geoengineering projects could not be stopped, once started, and would inquire increasing amounts of particles in order to keep temperatures down—a clear example of the self-perpetuating need for the control of nature.

“Like all glaciers, the Greenland ice sheet is made up entirely of accumulated snow. The most recent layers are thick and airy, while the older layers are thin and dense, which means that to drill down through the ice is to descend rapidly backward in time, at first gradually and then much more rapidly. About a hundred and forty feet down, there’s snow dating from the American Civil War; some twenty-five hundred feet down, snow from the time of Plato; and at a depth of five thousand three hundred and fifty feet, snow from when prehistoric painters were decorating the caves at Lascaux.”

Ice core samples are one of the ways in which people are understand the climate of the past, as each layer preserves the conditions of the time in which it was laid down—a possibility first identified by Danish geophysicist Willi Dansgaard. By examining ice cores, scientists have been able to note that most of human history has taken place in a period of relative climatic stability. By mentioning the distant past, Kolbert shows humanity’s long history of environmental modification—from lead pollution from Roman smelters to cave paintings in Lascaux.

“‘You know that they had just as big brains as we have today,’ he went on. ‘When you put it in a climatic framework, you can say, well, it was the ice age. And also this ice age was so climatically unstable that each time you had the beginnings of a culture, they had to move. Then comes the present interglacial—ten thousand years of very stable climate. The perfect conditions for agriculture. If you look at it, it’s amazing. Civilizations in Persia, in China, and in India start at the same time, maybe six thousand years ago. They all developed writing and they all developed religion and they all built cities, all at the same time, because the climate was stable.’”

By examining ice core samples derived from glaciers, researchers have identified many Dansgaard-Oeschger events—significant swings in the earth’s climate, where temperatures rose and fell by nearly ten degrees Celsius over the course of a century. Scientist J. P. Steffensen notes that this data has changed our appreciation of history, giving us an appreciation for why civilization was able to form in the past ten thousand years—a period of unusual stability, compared to past epochs. This gives a greater weight to the stakes of climate change—as humans bring about an end to climate stability by burning fossil fuels, we threaten civilization itself.