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.

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.

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.

First you reverse a river. Then you electrify it.

On the Illinois River, Asian carp currently make up almost three-quarters of the fish biomass, and on some waterways the proportion is even higher.

The Mississippi River’s drainage basin is the third largest in the world, exceeded in area only by the Amazon’s and the Congo’s. It stretches over more than 1.2 million square

In December 2009, the Corps shut down one of the electrical barriers on the canal to perform routine maintenance. The nearest Asian carp was believed to be fifteen miles downstream. Still, as a precaution, the Illinois Department of Natural Resources dosed the water with two thousand gallons of poison. The result was fifty-four thousand pounds of dead fish.

According to the Corps’ assessment, reimposing “hydrologic separation” would, indeed, be the most effective way to keep carp out of the Great Lakes. It would also, in the Corps’ estimate, take twenty-five years—three times as long as the original digging of the canal had—and cost up to $18 billion.

Countless videos of carp acrobatics are available on YouTube, with titles like “Asian Carpocalypse” and “The Attack of the Jumping Asian Carp.”

“People hear Asian carp—‘carp’ is a four-letter word—and they’re like ‘ewww,’ ” Irons said. But then, when they try it, they change their tune.

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

Thousands of miles of levees, flood walls, and revetments have been erected to manage the Mississippi. As the Army Corps of Engineers once boasted: “We harnessed it, straightened it, regularized it, shackled it.” This vast system, built to keep southern Louisiana dry, is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe.

In southern Louisiana, to borrow from Bob Dylan, any place that is “not busy being born is busy dying.”

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

he laid out the problem: How were two million people going to live in a region that was sinking into oblivion? The losses were particularly acute, he noted, in their own backyard.

In what’s become known as the “Great Flood of 1927,” two hundred and twenty-six crevasses were reported.

“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.”

In the sunny accounts aimed at tourists, New Orleans is called the “Crescent City,” for the curve of the river it was built along, or the “Big Easy,” for its laid-back vibe. In a less upbeat context, residents refer to it as the “bowl.”

The more water that’s pumped, the faster the city sinks.

THE CASE AGAINST REBUILDING THE SUNKEN CITY OF NEW ORLEANS, ran a headline in Slate a week after the hurricane.

South of the city, the Corps erected the world’s largest pumping station, part of a $1.1 billion structure called the West Closure Complex.

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.

McPhee included “Atchafalaya” in his book The Control of Nature, published in 1989.

It’s hard to say who occupies Mount Olympus these days, if anyone.

How Devils Hole got its pupfish is, as one ecologist has put it, a “beautiful enigma.” The cavern is a geological oddity—a portal to a vast, maze-like aquifer that runs far beneath the ground and holds water left over from the Pleistocene.

(Though Devils Hole is not in Death Valley—it’s across the Funeral Mountains, in the Amargosa Valley—for administrative purposes, it’s considered part of Death Valley National Park.)

Later, I did a calculation. Altogether, the pupfish at Devils Hole weighed in at about a hundred grams. This is slightly less than the weight of a McDonald’s Filet-O-Fish sandwich.

By 1889, Hornaday reckoned, the number of bison living “wild and unprotected” had fallen to fewer than six hundred and fifty. He predicted that in a few years, “hardly a bone will remain above ground to mark the existence of the most prolific mammalian species that ever existed, so far as we know.”

When the Europeans reached the islands of the Indian Ocean, they did in, among many other animals, the dodo, the red rail, the Mascarene coot, the Rodrigues solitaire, and the Réunion ibis.

What was different in the nineteenth century was the sheer pace of the violence.

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.

(Dihydrogen monoxide is a jokey name for water.)

In the cavern, pupfish live for about a year; in the tank, they can hang on for twice as long.

Depending on whom you ask, you’ll get a lot of different dates for the onset of the Anthropocene.

Stratigraphers, who like clarity, tend to favor the early 1950s.

SAVE THE PUPFISH stickers appeared on car bumpers. Then rival stickers appeared. KILL THE PUPFISH,

Devils Hole pupfish are, in their own small way, quite flashy.

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.

In botany, “apophytes” are native plants that thrive when people move in; “anthropophytes” are plants that thrive when people move them around.

According to the International Union for Conservation of Nature, which maintains the so-called Red List, a species counts as “vulnerable” when its odds of disappearing within a century are reckoned to be at least one in ten. A species qualifies as “endangered” when its numbers have declined by more than fifty percent over a decade or three generations, whichever is longer. A creature falls into the “critically endangered” category when it’s lost more than eighty percent of its population in that same time frame.

A species is “possibly extinct” when, on “the balance of evidence,” it seems likely to have vanished but its disappearance has not yet been confirmed.

The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth.

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

“A lot of the time, we’re running around with our hair on fire,” Guadalupe told me.