Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains.

today people outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of more than eight to one. Add in the weight of our domesticated animals—mostly cows and pigs—and that ratio climbs to twenty-two to one.

We have become the major driver of extinction and also, probably, of speciation. So pervasive is man’s impact, it is said that we live in a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene.

Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.

And so we face a no-analog predicament. If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control. Only now what’s got to be managed is not a nature that exists—or is imagined to exist—apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself—not so much the control of nature as the control of the control of nature. First you reverse a river. Then you electrify it.

“We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it.”

If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.

“Drive out nature though you will with a pitchfork,” Horace wrote in 20 B.C., “yet she will always hurry back, and before you know it, will break through your perverse disdain in triumph.”

The Devils Hole pupfish is a classic Stockholm species. When the water level in the cavern dropped in the late ’60s, the sham shelf and the lightbulbs installed by the National Park Service kept the fish alive.

Climate change was pushing ocean temperatures beyond many species’ tolerance. In 1998, a so-called global bleaching event, caused by a spike in water temperatures, killed more than fifteen percent of corals worldwide.

“Really what I am is a futurist,” she said at another point. “Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural.”

As water temperatures rise, the algae go into overdrive and begin to give off dangerous levels of oxygen radicals.

“All the climate models suggest that extreme heat waves will become annual events by mid- to late-century on most reefs in the world,” Van Oppen told me. “Rates of recovery are not going to be fast enough to cope with that. So I do think we need to intervene and help them.

“We know that rocks, they store CO2,” she told me. “They’re actually one of the biggest reservoirs of carbon on earth. The idea is to imitate and accelerate this process to fight global climate change.”

“Men make their own climate, but they do not make it just as they please.”

“All plants need CO2,” Ruser observed. “And if you supply more to them, they become stronger.”

In 1974, Mikhail Budyko, a prominent scientist at the Leningrad Geophysical Observatory, published a book titled Climatic Changes. Budyko laid out the dangers posed by rising CO2 levels but argued that their continued climb was inevitable: The only way to hold down emissions was to cut fossil-fuel use, and no nation was likely to do that.