Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

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

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 process involved pruning dozens of regional time zones down to four, which, in many towns, resulted in what’s become known as the “day with two noons.”

Plaquemines is the southeasternmost tip of Louisiana. It’s where the great funnel of the Mississippi basin narrows to a spout and Chicago’s flotsam and jetsam finally spill out to sea. On maps, the parish appears as a thick, muscular arm thrust into the Gulf of Mexico, with the river running, like a vein, down its center. At the very end of the arm, the Mississippi divides into three, an arrangement that calls to mind fingers or claws, hence the area’s name—the Bird’s Foot.

And what’s happening to Plaquemines is happening all along the coast. 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. 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.

And so a new round of public-works projects is under way. If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution. —

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

“That’s really getting up there,” he observed. We were driving alongside the river, but inside the levees, so for long stretches the Mississippi was invisible. Every so often, a ship would loom into view. From the vantage point of the road, it appeared to be floating not on water but on air, like a zeppelin.

“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.

day. I was struck, and not for the first time, by how much easier it is to ruin an ecosystem than to run one.

it. Twenty thousand years ago, wolves were domesticated. The result was a new species (or, by some accounts, subspecies) as well as two new categories: the “tame” and the “wild.” With the domestication of wheat, around ten thousand years ago, the plant world split. Some plants became “crops” and others “weeds.” In the brave new world of the Anthropocene, the divisions keep multiplying.

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. Coyotes profit from human disturbance but skirt areas dense with human activity; they have been dubbed “misanthropic synanthropes.” In botany, “apophytes” are native plants that thrive when people move in; “anthropophytes” are plants that thrive when people move them around. Anthropophytes can be still further subdivided into “archaeophytes,” which were spread before Europeans arrived in the New World, and “kenophytes,” which were spread afterward.

vulnerable. The simulacrum lies beyond the reach of human disruption because it’s totally human.

I also saw: sharks, dolphins, manta rays, sea turtles, sea cucumbers, octopuses with startled eyes, giant clams with leering lips, and fish in more colors than dreamt of by Crayola.

(If the rest of us were coral voyeurs, the filmmakers, it occurred to me, were pornographers.)

For this reason, geoengineering has been compared to treating a heroin habit with methadone, though perhaps a more apt comparison would be to treating a heroin habit with amphetamines. The end result is two addictions in place of one.

This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In