Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

If Chicago is the City of the Big Shoulders, the Sanitary and Ship Canal might be thought of as its Oversized Sphincter.

“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.

As the crow flies, the fake Devils Hole is about a mile from the real one. It’s housed in an unmarked hangar-like building, the entrance to which is framed by a pair of signs. One reads CAUTION: PERSONAL PROTECTIVE EQUIPMENT REQUIRED BEYOND THIS POINT, and the second: WARNING! DIHYDROGEN MONOXIDE: USE EXTREME CAUTION.

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Another desert pupfish, the Owens pupfish, was thought to be extinct, only to be rediscovered in 1964. By 1969, it was just barely hanging on, in a pond the size of a rec room, when, for reasons no one could quite explain, the pond shrank to a puddle. Someone alerted Phil Pister, a biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game, who rushed to the site—a spot known as Fish Slough. 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.

Coral sex is a rare and amazing sight.

“We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand, editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, famously wrote in its first issue, published in 1968.

Responding to Brand, Wilson has observed, “We are not as gods. We’re not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything.”

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.”

‘You know what? I’m a scientist. My job is not to tell people the good news. My job is to describe the world as accurately as possible.’