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.

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.

“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,”

Herbicides and pesticides represented the very worst kind of “cave man” thinking—a club “hurled against the fabric of life.”

Plaquemines has the distinction—a dubious one, at best—of being among the fastest-disappearing places on earth.

Since the 1930s, Louisiana has shrunk by more than two thousand square miles.

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

“land-loss crisis,”

the consistency of the region’s soil has been compared to warm Jell-O.

city of New Orleans sits on a lobe—the St. Bernard—created around the time of the Pyramids.

Rather than retreat again, the French dug in. They raised artificial levees atop the natural ones and started cutting drainage channels through the muck. Most of this backbreaking labor was performed by African slaves.

With each flood, the levees were improved—built higher and wider and longer.

One house we passed had been raised to a particularly vertiginous height; Simoneaux estimated its pilings were thirty feet tall.

residents refer to it as the “bowl.” By now, most of the bowl lies at or below sea level—some spots as much as fifteen feet below.

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.

Retreat might make geophysical sense, but politically it was a nonstarter.

“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.”

Meanwhile, a plume of radioactive water is creeping its way toward the cavern from the Nevada Test Site.

even as Manly was eating his way across the continent, he was helping to make that practice infeasible.

“For one species to mourn the death of another is a new thing under the sun,” Aldo Leopold noted in an essay commemorating the passenger pigeon’s passing.

aboveground nuclear testing became routine. The tests left behind a more or less permanent marker—a spike in radioactive particles, some of which have a half-life of tens of thousands of years.

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. The mushroom clouds, which were visible from Las Vegas, became a tourist draw.

There is no lack of water here, unless you try to establish a city where no city should be.

“All living things on earth are kindred.”

It’s often observed that nature—or at least the concept of it—is tangled up in culture.

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.

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

at the center of every atoll lay an extinct volcano.

Corals had attached themselves to the volcano’s flanks, and as the volcano expired and slowly sank away, the reef had kept growing upward, toward the light. An atoll, Darwin observed, was a kind of a monument to a lost island, “raised by myriads of tiny architects.”

“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.”

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.

Coral sex is a rare and amazing sight. On the Great Barrier Reef, it takes place once a year, in November or December, shortly after a full moon. During the event, called a mass spawning, billions of polyps release in synchrony tiny, bead-like bundles. These bundles, which contain both sperm and eggs, float to the surface and break apart. Most of the gametes become fish food or simply drift away. The lucky ones meet a gamete of the opposite sex and produce a coral embryo.

The Great Barrier Reef isn’t a reef so much as a collection of reefs—some three thousand in all—that stretches over one hundred thirty-five thousand square miles, an area larger than Italy.

But as is so often the case, solving one set of problems introduces new ones. In this case, big ones. Humongous ones. Gene-drive technology has been compared to Kurt Vonnegut’s ice-nine, a single shard of which is enough to freeze all the water in the world. A single X-shredder mouse on the loose could, it’s feared, have a similarly chilling effect—a sort of mice-nine.

James Watt designed a new kind of steam engine. Watt’s engine, it’s often said, anachronistically, “kick-started” the Industrial Revolution. As water power gave way to steam power, CO2 emissions began to rise, at first slowly, then vertiginously. In 1776, the first year Watt marketed his invention, humans emitted some fifteen million tons of CO2. By 1800, that figure had risen to thirty million tons. By 1850 it had increased to two hundred million tons a year and by 1900 to almost two billion.

“As a geologist, I think about timescales,” he went on. “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. That’s just basic physics. We’re not sure how much additional warming that is, but it could easily be another seventy percent beyond what we’ve experienced. So in that sense, we’re already at 2°C. We’re going to be lucky to stop at 4°C. That’s not optimistic or pessimistic. I think that’s objective reality.” (A 4°C global temperature increase—7.2° F—is not just well beyond the official threshold of disaster, it’s heading into territory that’s probably best described as unthinkable.)