Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

“Pumping is a big part of the issue,” Kolker told me, as we climbed back onto our sweaty bicycles. “It accelerates subsidence, so it becomes a positive feedback loop.”

Proposals to allow parts of the city to revert to water were floated and then, one by one, rejected. Retreat might make geophysical sense, but politically it was a nonstarter.

Katrina

These pharaonic structures have kept the city dry through several recent storms, and, from a certain perspective, New Orleans now appears substantially better protected than when Katrina hit. But what looks like a defense from one angle can look like a trap from another.

Since the close of the crevasse period, land loss to the south has brought the city some twenty miles closer to the Gulf. It’s been estimated that for every three miles a storm has to travel over land, its surge is reduced by a foot. If this is the case, then the threat to New Orleans has grown seven feet higher.

“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.”

I asked Kolker how he saw the future. “Sea level will continue to rise,” he said. The diversions planned for Plaquemines would add some land back to the marshes south of the city, and so, too, would more-conventional dredging projects, like BA-39. “But I think the areas that don’t get restored will flood more and more frequently. There will be continued wetland loss.” The city once known as L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans would, in coming years, Kolker predicted, “look more and more like an island.”

Since Billiot was a child, Isle de Jean Charles has shrunk from thirty-five square miles to half a square mile—a loss in area of more than ninety-eight percent.

The island is disappearing for all the usual reasons. It’s part of an ancient delta lobe whose soil is compacting. Sea levels are rising. In the early part of the twentieth century, it lost its main sources of fresh sediment to flood-control measures. Then came the oil industry, which dug canals through the wetlands. The canals pulled in salt water, and, as the salinity rose, the reeds and marsh grasses died. The die-off widened the channels, allowing in more salt water, causing more die-off and more widening.

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, farther 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 that new forms of control were being imposed to counter the effects of the old, they were being excluded from those, too.

As the party approached Death Valley—at that point an uncharted expanse of desert—the mood grew particularly grim. Sitting around the campfire a few nights after Manly had broken down in tears, one man described the region as the “Creator’s dumping place,” where he “left the worthless dregs after making a world.” Another said it must be “the very place where Lot’s wife was turned into a pillar of salt,” only the pillar had been “broken up and spread around the country.”

Manly peered into the water and noticed something strange. The pool was surrounded by rock and sand. It was miles from any other water body. Yet it was dancing with fish. Decades later he would remember these tiny “minnows,” each “not much more than an inch long.” — The cavern the forty-niners chanced upon is now known as Devils Hole and the “minnows” as Devils Hole pupfish, or, scientifically speaking, Cyprinodon diabolis.

The pool, which is about sixty feet long and eight feet wide, constitutes Cyprinodon diabolis’s entire habitat. This, it’s believed, is the smallest range of any vertebrate.

I started reading around and happened upon Manly’s memoir, Death Valley in ’49. I learned that desert fish are a rich and diverse group. Every year, the Desert Fishes Council holds a meeting somewhere in northern Mexico or the western United States; typically, the program for the meeting runs to forty pages.

In the Death Valley area alone, there were at one time eleven species and subspecies of pupfish. One is now extinct, another is believed to be extinct, and the rest are all threatened. The Devils Hole pupfish may well be the rarest fish in the world.

Thanks in good measure to his efforts, the skinny-dipper had ended up in prison. (The vomiter was sentenced to probation.) The reporter had made Wilson out to be a hero—a dogged desert Columbo—but, in the process, she had described him as potbellied and stern. Wilson was still brooding over the description. At one point he turned to the side so I could get a profile view of his stomach. “Is this a potbelly?” he asked. I suggested it might better be described as a “paunch.”

In his early twenties, Manly hunted his way to Wisconsin. In one three-day period, he killed four bears. He ate so much bear meat he spent the next day vomiting. “So long as I had my gun and ammunition I could kill game enough to live on,” he would later write. In 1849, he and his companions shot their way to Salt Lake City.

No larder can be drawn upon indefinitely, and even as Manly was eating his way across the continent, he was helping to make that practice infeasible. In the 1850s, Thoreau lamented the extirpation from New England of moose, cougar, beavers, and wolverines: “Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with?” Woods that were once thick with wild turkeys were, by the 1860s, all but empty of them. Eastern elk, once plentiful from the Atlantic to the Mississippi, were gone by the 1870s. Passenger pigeons, which formed such immense flocks they blocked the sun, were eliminated around the same time; the last great nesting event—which was also the last great slaughter—took place in 1882.

What was different in the nineteenth century was the sheer pace of the violence. If earlier losses had unfolded gradually—so gradually that not even the participants would have been aware of what was going on—the advent of technologies like the railroad and the repeating rifle turned extinction into a readily observable phenomenon. In the United States, and indeed around the world, it became possible to watch creatures vanish in real time.

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.

As the crow flies, the fake Devils Hole is about a mile from the real one. It’s housed in an unmarked hangar-like building, the entrance to which is framed by a pair of signs. One reads CAUTION: PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT, and the second: WARNING! DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE: USE EXTREME CAUTION. The first time I visited, I asked about the signs. I was told they’d been put up to deter politically engaged if chemically clueless protesters from trying to break in and trash the place. (Dihydrogen monoxide is a jokey name for water.)

The beetle, from the genus Neoclypeodytes, had been brought over with the other invertebrates from Devils Hole, and it had made the transition to the concrete version all too cheerfully. It was reproducing far faster than in the wild, and somewhere along the way it had developed a taste for pupfish young.

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, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.

In January 1952, President Harry S. Truman added Devils Hole to Death Valley National Park. In a proclamation, Truman said his goal was to protect the “peculiar race of desert fish” that lived in the “remarkable underground pool” and “nowhere else in the world.” That spring, the Department of Defense detonated eight nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site, about fifty miles north of Devils Hole. The following spring, it detonated eleven more bombs.

It’s often observed that nature—or at least the concept of it—is tangled up in culture. Until there was something that could be set against it—technology, art, consciousness—there was only “nature,” and so no real use for the category.

One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and, eventually, new species evolved to take their place. But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid.

These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back. The term of art for such creatures is “conservation-reliant,” though they might also be called “Stockholm species” for their utter dependence on their persecutors.

After the courts put an end to pumping near the cavern, the water level crept back up, but the aquifer never fully recovered. Today, the water level in the cavern is still about a foot lower than it should be. The ecosystem in the pool has, as a consequence, shifted and the food web frayed. Since 2006, the Park Service has been delivering supplemental meals, including brine shrimp and fairy shrimp—Grubhub for fish.

There is no exact tally of how many species, like the pupfish, are now conservation-reliant. At a minimum, they number in the thousands. As for the forms of assistance they rely on, these, too, are legion. They include, in addition to supplemental feeding and captive breeding: double-clutching, headstarting, enclosures, exclosures, managed burns, chelation, guided migration, hand-pollination, artificial insemination, predator-avoidance training, and conditioned taste aversion. Every year, this list grows. “Old deeds for old people, and new deeds for new,” observed Thoreau.

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 animals. “What good are pupfish?” they’d demand. “What good are you?” Pister would respond.

In a pond not far from Devils Hole lives the Ash Meadows Amargosa pupfish (Cyprinodon nevadensis mionectes). The pond is surrounded by a landscape so sere it brought to mind Manly’s misadventures; just walking the couple of hundred yards from the road, I thought: even today, a person could die in the Mojave and no one would notice.

As the environmental historian J. R. McNeill has observed, paraphrasing Marx: “Men make their own biosphere, but they do not make it just as they please.”

“I’m a realist,” Gates told me at one point. “I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. It already is changed.” People could either “assist” corals in coping with the change they’d brought about, or they could watch them die. Anything else, in her view, was wishful thinking.

“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.”

“If feeble man can do [so] much by his powers of artificial selection,” there was, Darwin speculated, “no limit to the amount of change” that could be effected by “nature’s power of selection.” A century and a half after On the Origin of Species, Darwin’s argument-by-analogy is still compelling, though every year it gets harder to keep the terms straight. “Feeble man” is changing the climate, and this is exerting strong selective pressure. So are myriad other forms of “global change”: deforestation, habitat fragmentation, introduced predators, introduced pathogens, light pollution, air pollution, water pollution, herbicides, insecticides, and rodenticides. What do you call natural selection after The End of Nature?

The heat wave that began in Hawaii in 2014 reached the Great Barrier Reef in 2016, producing another global bleaching event. By the time it ended, the following year, more than ninety percent of the Great Barrier Reef had been affected and something like half its corals had perished. Fast-growing species were particularly hard-hit; they suffered what researchers termed a “catastrophic” collapse.

“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. “Hopefully the world will come to its senses soon and actually start to reduce greenhouse gases,” she went on. “Or maybe there will be some wonderful technological invention that will solve the problem. Who knows what’s going to happen? But we need to buy time. So I see assisted evolution as filling that gap, being a bridge between now and the day when we’re really holding down climate change or, hopefully, reversing it.”

Tank-raised corals will, if kept under the right conditions, spawn in sync with their relatives out in the ocean. For Van Oppen’s team, the spawning offered a critical opportunity to nudge evolution along. The plan was to catch the captive corals in the act, scoop up the gamete bundles, and then, a bit like pigeon fanciers, pick and choose the couplings.

The number of species that can be found on a healthy patch of reef is probably greater than can be encountered in a similar amount of space anywhere else on earth, including the Amazon rainforest. Researchers once picked apart a single coral colony and counted more than eight thousand burrowing creatures belonging to more than two hundred species. Using genetic-sequencing techniques, other researchers tallied the number of species they could find of crustaceans alone. In one basketball-sized chunk of coral from the northern end of the Great Barrier Reef, they came up with more than two hundred species—mostly crabs and shrimp—and in a similar-sized chunk from the southern end, they identified almost two hundred and thirty species. It’s estimated that, worldwide, reefs are home to between one and nine million species, though the scientists who conducted the crustacean study concluded that even the high-end estimates probably are too low. It is likely, they wrote, that “the diversity of reefs” has been “seriously under-detected.”

Coral reefs are found only in a band that extends along the equator, from about thirty degrees north to thirty degrees south latitude. At these latitudes, there’s not much mixing between the top and the bottom layers of the water column, and essential nutrients, like nitrogen and phosphorus, are in short supply. (The reason the water in the tropics is often so marvelously clear is that little can survive in it.) How reefs support so much diversity under such austere conditions has long puzzled scientists—a conundrum that’s become known as “Darwin’s paradox.” The best answer anyone has come up with is that reef dwellers have developed the ultimate recycling system: one creature’s trash becomes its neighbor’s treasure. “In the coral city there is no waste,” Richard C. Murphy, a marine biologist who worked with Cousteau, has written. “The by-product of every organism is a resource for another.”

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.

A few months before my visit to Australia, GBRMPA had issued an “outlook report,” something it’s required to do every five years. The authority said that the reef’s long-term prospects, which it had previously characterized as “poor,” had declined to “very poor.” Right around the time GBRMPA issued this grim assessment, the Australian government approved a gigantic new coal mine for a site a few hours south of the SeaSim. The mine, often described as a “mega-mine,” is expected to send most of its coal to India via a port—Abbot Point—situated right along the reef. Saving corals and mining more coal are, as many commentators pointed out, activities that are tough to reconcile. “The world’s most insane energy project” was Rolling Stone’s assessment.

“If we had strongly acted on climate change thirty years ago, I don’t know that we’d be having this conversation,” Wachenfeld told me. He was wearing a dark-blue polo shirt embroidered with the symbol of the Australian commonwealth, which features a kangaroo gazing at an emu. “We’d be much more likely to be saying, as long as we protect the marine park, we think the reef will look after itself.”

Wachenfeld told me that the new technologies would probably have to be deployed in tandem, so that, for example, a robot might deliver genetically enhanced larvae to a reef shaded by a thin film or man-made fog. “There’s all sorts of just amazingly imaginative innovation,” he said.

Everyone I spoke to in Australia understood that preserving the Great Barrier Reef in all its greatness was beyond what could realistically—or unrealistically—be hoped for. Even settling for a tenth of it would mean shading and robotically seeding an area the size of Switzerland. What was at issue was, at best, a diminished thing—a kind of Okay Barrier Reef.

Very sad

“If we can extend the life of the reef by twenty, thirty years, that might be just enough for the world to get its act together on emissions, and it might make the difference between having nothing and having some sort of functional reef,” Hardisty told me. “I mean, it’s really sad that we have to talk like that. But that’s where we are now.”

During my trip to One Tree, I was lucky enough to take a midnight snorkel through a spawning. The scene resembled a blizzard in the Alps, only upside down. Even in a bucket, spawning is a marvel. First, just a few polyps release their bundles; then the rest follow suit, as if prompted by some secret signal. The bundles rise through the water in defiance of gravity. On the surface, they form a rosy-colored slick. “This is one of the real miracles of nature,” I overheard a scientist on the gene-editing team say, more to himself than to anyone else.

The students swirled with grave concentration. The eggs looked like flecks of pink pepper. The bowls of sperm looked like, well, what you’d expect. “I can take your sperm if you want,” I heard a young woman call out. “Yes, have a bowl of my sperm,” a young man replied. “This is the only place where it’s safe to say that,” a third student observed.

A few years ago, a Chinese scientist, He Jiankui, announced that he had produced the world’s first CRISPR-edited humans—twin baby girls. According to He, the girls’ genes had been tweaked to confer resistance to HIV, though whether this is actually the case remains unclear. Shortly after he made the announcement, He was placed under house arrest in Shenzhen.

If it felt a little creepy engineering a drug-resistant strain of E. coli in my kitchen, there was also a definite sense of achievement.