Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

reversing the Chicago didn’t just flush waste toward St. Louis. It also upended the hydrology of roughly two-thirds of the United States.

It was the biggest public-works project of its time, a textbook example of what used to be called, without irony, the control of nature.

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.

That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact.

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.

“The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the convenience of man,” she wrote. Herbicides and pesticides represented the very worst kind of “cave man” thinking—a club “hurled against the fabric of life.”

Rachel Carson - Silent Spring

“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.”

Very unfortunate indeed. Invasive species, animal and plant, are wiping out the native ones.

“Who hears the fishes when they cry?” Thoreau asked. “It will not be forgotten by some memory that we were contemporaries.”

Every hour and a half, Louisiana sheds another football field’s worth of land. Every few minutes, it drops a tennis court’s worth. On maps, the state may still resemble a boot. Really, though, at this point, the bottom of the boot is in tatters, missing not just a sole but also its heel and a good part of its instep.

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. 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. This is true even of teenagers. 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.

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.

The mighty Mississippi River “I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river is a strong brown god,” T. S. Eliot

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.

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.”

The furthest along of the man-made crevasses is a project known as the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion. The diversion will be six hundred feet wide and thirty feet deep and lined with enough concrete and riprap to pave over Greenwich Village.

It will start on the west bank of the Mississippi, some thirty-five miles upriver of Buras, then, in evident defiance of hydrology, run in a perfectly straight line due west for two and a half miles, to Barataria Bay. When it’s operating at maximum capacity, some seventy-five thousand cubic feet of water will pass through it every second. In terms of flow, this will make it the twelfth-largest river in the United States. (For comparison’s sake, the Hudson River’s average flow is twenty thousand cubic feet per second.) Nothing quite like it has ever been attempted before.

“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.”

When you’re in the city, it’s hard to imagine the entire place sinking underneath you, yet it is. 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.

“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.”

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. American ornithologists have developed a list of “common birds in steep decline”; it includes such familiar creatures as chimney swifts, field sparrows, and herring gulls. Even among insects, a class long thought to be extinction-resistant, numbers are plunging.

There is no shortage of water in the desert but exactly the right amount, a perfect ratio of water to rock, of water to sand, insuring that wide, free, open, generous spacing among plants and animals, homes and towns and cities, which makes the arid West so different from any other part of the nation. There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

A passage from Edward Abbey’s book Desert Solitaire.

As the tiny heart in the tiny egg pulsated away, I was reminded of the first sonogram images of my own children and of another line from Abbey: “All living things on earth are kindred.”

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.

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. Terry Hughes, a coral biologist at Australia’s James Cook University, took an aerial survey of the damage and showed it to his students. “And then we wept,” he tweeted.

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.

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.

Since no one knows exactly 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 was natural selection—indifferent, but infinitely patient—that had given rise to life’s astonishing diversity. In the final, oft-quoted paragraph of On the Origin of Species, Darwin conjures an “entangled bank, clothed with many plants of many kinds, with birds singing on the bushes, with various insects flitting about, and with worms crawling through the damp earth.” All of these “elaborately constructed forms, so different from each other, and dependent on each other in so complex a manner,” had been produced by the same mindless, inhuman force.

“It’s just absolute hubris and so arrogant to think that we can survive without everything else. We come from this planet." --- Paul Hardisty, head of the Institute that runs SeaSim in Australia

The Great Barrier Reef might be thought of as the ultimate “entangled bank.” Tens of millions of years of evolution have gone into its creation, with the result that even a fist-sized piece of it is unfathomably dense with life, crammed with creatures “dependent on each other in so complex a manner” that biologists will probably never fully master the relations. And the reef—today, at least—goes on and on.

“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.”

Europe’s weather turned gray and cold. In what is probably the world’s most famous summer share, Lord Byron rented a villa on Lake Geneva in June 1816, with Percy and Mary Shelley as his housemates. Confined indoors by the season’s ceaseless rain, they decided to write ghost stories, an exercise that gave birth to Frankenstein.

Mount Tambora eruption, aftermath, 1816

In New England, 1816 became known as the “year without a summer” or “eighteen-hundred-and-froze-to-death.” In mid-June it was so cold in central Vermont that foot-long icicles dripped from the eaves. “The very face of nature,” opined the Vermont Mirror, “appears to be shrouded in a death-like gloom.” On July 8, there was frost as far south as Richmond, Virginia.

Chester Dewey, a professor at Williams College, in Williamstown, Massachusetts, recorded a freeze on August 22 that killed the cucumber crop. A harder freeze on August 29 killed most of the corn.

Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program, an effort funded, in part, by Bill Gates.

Of course 🙄

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 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. As the snow is compressed, its crystal structure changes to ice. But in most other respects, it remains unchanged, a relic of the moment it formed. In the Greenland ice, there’s volcanic ash from Tambora, lead pollution from Roman smelters, and dust blown in from Mongolia on ice age winds. Every layer contains tiny bubbles of trapped air, each a sample of a past atmosphere. To someone who knows how to read them, the layers are an archive of the sky.