Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

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.

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

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.

“We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”

“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.”

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.

Consider the “synanthrope.” This is an animal that has not been domesticated and yet, for whatever reason, turns out to be peculiarly well suited to life on a farm or in the big city. Synanthropes (from the Greek syn, for “together,” and anthropos, “man”) include raccoons, American crows, Norway rats, Asian carp, house mice, and a couple of dozen species of cockroach.

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

“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?

In a bleaching event, it’s the corals’ relationship with their symbionts that breaks down. As water temperatures rise, the algae go into overdrive and begin to give off dangerous levels of oxygen radicals. To protect themselves, the corals expel their algae and, as a consequence, turn white. If a heat wave breaks in time, corals can attract new symbionts and recover. If it’s too prolonged, they starve to death.

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.

Paul Kingsnorth, a British writer and activist, has put it this way: “We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it…We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We are Saturn, devouring our children.”

To paraphrase J. R. McNeill paraphrasing Marx, “Men make their own climate, but they do not make it just as they please.”

To stave off 1.5°C, they’d have to drop most of the way toward zero within a single decade. This would entail, for starters: revamping agricultural systems, transforming manufacturing, scrapping gasoline- and diesel-powered vehicles, and replacing most of the world’s power plants.

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 Minh 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. (A related program—Operation Commando Lava—involved dumping a mix of chemicals on the trail in an effort to destabilize the soil.)

“The timescale of the climate system is centuries to tens of thousands of years. If we stop CO2 emissions tomorrow, which, of course, is impossible, it’s still going to warm at least for centuries, because the ocean hasn’t equilibrated.

One way to gloss the Camp Century story is as another Anthropocene allegory. Man sets out to “conquer his environment.” He congratulates himself for his resourcefulness and derring-do, only to find the walls closing in. Drive out nature with a snowblower, yet she will always hurry back.

Here I was, trying to finish a book about the world spinning out of control, only to find the world spinning so far out of control that I couldn’t finish the book.

But to imagine that “dimming the fucking sun” could be less dangerous than not dimming it, you have to imagine not only that the technology will work according to plan but also that it will be deployed according to plan. And that’s a lot of imagining.

It would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedented world, where silver carp glisten under a white sky.