Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

The canal, which was planned in the closing years of the nineteenth century and opened at the start of the twentieth, flipped the river on its head. It compelled the Chicago to change its direction, so that instead of draining into Lake Michigan, the city’s ordure would flow away from it, into the Des Plaines River, and from there into the Illinois, the Mississippi, and, ultimately, the Gulf of Mexico. WATER IN CHICAGO RIVER NOW RESEMBLES LIQUID, ran the headline in The New York Times.

But reversing the Chicago didn’t just flush waste toward St. Louis. It also upended the hydrology of roughly two-thirds of the United States. This had ecological consequences, which had financial consequences, which, in turn, forced a whole new round of interventions on the backward-flowing river.

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. We have dammed or diverted most of the world’s major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do. We now routinely cause earthquakes.

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.

Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago.

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.

The Corps later installed two additional barriers on the canal, which significantly upped the voltage, and, at the time of my visit, it was replacing the original barrier with a more powerful version. It was also planning to take the fight to a whole new level, by installing a barrier that featured loud noise and bubbles. The cost of the bubble barrier was first estimated at $275 million, then later rose to $775 million. “People joke about it being a disco barrier,” Shea said. It was a line, it occurred to me, he might well have used at a party.

All to stop fish

In the sort of irony the Anthropocene teems with, the number of free-swimming carp in China has crashed even as pond-raised populations have soared. Thanks to projects like the Three Gorges Dam, on the Yangtze, river fish are having trouble spawning. The carp are thus at once instruments of human control and victims of it.

For one study, silver carp were placed in treatment lagoons in Benton, a suburb of Little Rock. The fish did indeed reduce the nutrient load before they, too, escaped. No one is quite sure how, because no one was watching.

“At the time, everybody was looking for a way to clean up the environment,” Mike Freeze, a biologist who worked with carp at the Arkansas Game and Fish Commission, told me. “Rachel Carson had written Silent Spring, and everybody was concerned about all the chemicals in the water. They weren’t nearly as concerned about non-native species, which is unfortunate.”

As the journalist Dan Egan has put it: “Bighead and silver carp don’t just invade ecosystems. They conquer them.” On the Illinois River, Asian carp currently make up almost three-quarters of the fish biomass, and on some waterways the proportion is even higher. The ecological damage, meanwhile, extends beyond fish; black carp, which feed on mollusks, are, it’s feared, pushing already-threatened freshwater mussels over the edge.

When Asian carp arrived, buffalo populations plummeted. Now Seidemann makes most of his income from contract killing for the Illinois Department of Natural Resources. It seemed rude to ask him how much, but later I learned that contract fishermen can gross more than $5,000 a week.

Lucrative

This round of barrier defense continued for another three days. The final tally was six thousand four hundred and four silver carp and five hundred and forty-seven bighead. Collectively, the fish weighed more than fifty thousand pounds. They were shipped west in the semi, to be ground into fertilizer.

The two great basins abut each other, but they are—or were—distinct aquatic worlds. There was no way for a fish (or a mollusk or a crustacean) to climb out of one drainage system and into the other. When Chicago solved its sewage problem by digging the Sanitary and Ship Canal, a portal opened up, and the two aquatic realms were connected.

Great lakes and mississippi

According to the Corps’ assessment, reimposing “hydrologic separation” would, indeed, be the most effective way to keep carp out of the Great Lakes. It would also, in the Corps’ estimate, take twenty-five years—three times as long as the original digging of the canal had—and cost up to $18 billion. Many experts I spoke to said the billions would be money well spent. They pointed out that each of the two drainage basins has its own roster of invasives, some, like the carp, brought over intentionally, but most introduced accidentally, in ballast water.

The surest way to control the invaders would be to plug the canal. But no one who spoke up for “hydrologic separation” said they thought it would ever happen.

There were too many constituencies with a vested interest in the way things were. “Politically, it just would never move,” the leader of one group that had pushed for separation but had eventually given up on the idea told me. It was a lot easier to imagine changing the river once again—with electricity and bubbles and noise and anything else anyone could dream up—than changing the lives of the people around it.

One of the fishermen I met in Ottawa told me he’d been knocked unconscious by an encounter with a flying carp. A second said he’d long ago lost track of his carp-related injuries, because “you pretty much get hit every day.” A woman I read about was knocked off her Jet Ski by a carp and survived only because a passing boater noticed her life jacket bobbing in the water.

Mills was one of several people I met in Illinois who, for reasons that were not always entirely clear to me, had decided to throw themselves into the fight against Asian carp.

Half of the hoop nets had been baited with Mills’s bricks, which hung in little mesh bags. The hope was that the baited nets would attract more carp. The fishermen made no secret of their skepticism. One of them griped to me about the smell of the carp candy, a complaint I found curious since the odor it was competing with was the stench of dead fish. Another rolled his eyes at what he saw as a waste of money.

“People feel passionately about the Great Lakes, the ecosystem, even though it’s highly altered,” he said. “We have to be careful about saying, ‘Oh, this pristine system,’ because it’s not really natural anymore.”

Carter, who owns a fish market in Springfield, is, like Irons, a carp-eating evangelist. He told me that one of his friends had his nose broken by a jumping carp and, as a result, had to have eye surgery.

“We need to control them,” he said. “If you can catch millions and tens of millions of pounds of them, it’s going to help, and the only way to do that is to create a demand for them.” He took the strips he’d cut, rolled them in breadcrumbs, and deep-fried them. It was a warm late-summer day, and by this point he was sweating profusely. When the strips were done, he offered them around as samples, to general approval. “Tastes like chicken,” I heard one boy say.

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.

Plaquemines has the distinction—a dubious one, at best—of being among the fastest-disappearing places on earth. Everyone who lives in the parish—and fewer and fewer people do—can point to some stretch of water that used to have a house or a hunting camp on it.

A few years ago, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration officially retired thirty-one Plaquemines place names, including Bay Jacquin and Dry Cypress Bayou, because there was no there there anymore.

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles. If Delaware or Rhode Island had lost that much territory, America would have only forty-nine states.

Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land.

What leaping carp are to Chicagoland, sunken fields are to the parishes around New Orleans—evidence of a man-made natural disaster.

Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manage the Mississippi. As the Army Corps of Engineers once boasted: “We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it.” This vast system, built to keep southern Louisiana dry, is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe.

If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more cont...

Whenever the river overtopped its banks—something it used to do virtually every spring—it cast its sediment across the plain. Season after season, layer after layer, clay and sand and silt built up. In this way, the “strong brown god” assembled the Louisiana coast out of bits and pieces of Illinois and Iowa and Minnesota and Missouri and Arkansas and Kentucky.

Such a mutable landscape is a tough one to settle. Nevertheless, Native Americans were living in the delta even as it was being created. Their strategy for dealing with the river’s vagaries, as far as archaeologists have been able to determine, was one of accommodation. When the Mississippi flooded, they sought higher ground. When it shifted quarters, they did, too.

Not surprisingly, the French chose to build where the land was highest. Counterintuitively, this was right up against the Mississippi, on ridges built by the river itself. During floods, sand and other heavy particles tend to settle out of the water first, creating what are known as natural levees. (Levée in French simply means “raised.”)

These early levees, made of earth reinforced with timber, failed frequently. But they established a pattern that endures to this day. Since the city wasn’t going to move to suit the river, the river would have to be made to stay put. With each flood, the levees were improved—built higher and wider and longer. By the War of 1812, they extended for more than a hundred and fifty miles.

Prominently displayed on one of the walls of the center is a maxim attributed to Albert Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

In the days before floodgates and spillways, a super-wet spring like that of 2011 would have sent the Mississippi and its distributaries surging over their banks. The floodwaters would have wreaked havoc, but they would have spread tens of millions of tons of sand and clay across thousands of square miles of countryside. The new sediment would have formed a fresh layer of soil and, in this way, countered subsidence. Thanks to the intervention of the engineers, there had been no spillover, no havoc, and hence no land-building. The future of southern Louisiana had instead washed out to sea.

BA-39 had proved, not that further proof was really necessary, what enough pipes and pumps and diesel fuel can accomplish. Nearly a million cubic yards of sediment had made the five-mile journey, resulting in the creation—or, to be more exact, the re-creation—of one hundred and eighty-six paludal acres.

“We took centuries of land-building and we did it in a year,” Simoneaux observed.

In response to the “great flood,” Congress in effect nationalized flood control along the Mississippi and entrusted the work to the Army Corps of Engineers. Joseph Ransdell, Louisiana’s senior U.S. senator at the time, called the Flood Control Act of 1928 the most important piece of water-related legislation “since the world began.”

A poem commemorating the Corps’ efforts declared: The plan was an engineer masterpiece Fashioned by experts, a grand bas-relief Levees, floodways, and other improvements Blended into a project beneficent.

But with the end of river flooding came an end to fresh sediment. In the succinct formulation of Donald Davis, a geographer at LSU: “The Mississippi River was controlled; land was lost; the environment changed.”

CPRA’s “bold” scheme for saving Plaquemines is to rehabilitate the crevasse for a post-crevasse age. The agency’s master plan calls for punching eight giant holes through the levees on the Mississippi and two more through those on its main distributary, the Atchafalaya. The openings will be gated and channelized, and the channels will themselves be leveed. CPRA likes to characterize the effort as a form of restoration—as a way to “reestablish the natural sediment deposition process.” And this is true, but only in the sense that electrifying a river might be called natural.

A man in the corner of the room raised his hand. “I assume you’re going to build it,” he said of the Mid-Barataria project. “But what is the damage going to be?” Despite Barth’s assurances, the man was worried about how much fresh water would be directed into the basin and how that would affect recreational fishing. “Speckled trout will be done,” he declared. “If this were a natural crevasse, I’d be all for it,” he said. “But when we as humans intervene, it rarely turns out well. That’s why we are where we are today.”

Kolker braked at an enormous pothole. It had been patched with asphalt, and this patch had developed a new pothole of its own. “Subsidence happens on a couple of different scales,” he observed. “You have the big scale, where the old marshes are degrading. And then you have smaller-scale features, like this.”

A recent study that relied on satellite data found some parts of New Orleans dropping by almost half a foot a decade. “That’s one of the fastest rates on earth,” Kolker noted.

“New Orleans’ drainage problem is a terrible one,” a front-page article in the Item observed in May of that year. “To meet the problem, New Orleans has constructed the greatest drainage system in the world. “Man every day is surpassing Nature,” the article declared. “He has thrown back the giant Mississippi and made it go where it listeth not.”

1920

But New Orleans’s world-class drainage system, like its world-class levee system, is a sort of Trojan solution. Since marshy soils compact through dewatering, pumping water out of the ground exacerbates the very problem that needs to be solved. The more water that’s pumped, the faster the city sinks. And the more it sinks, the more pumping is required.