Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
Written by Elizabeth Kolbert
Narrated by Rebecca Lowman
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
The New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment in Under a White Sky.
That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The question we now face is: Can we change nature, this time in order to save it?
Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction, takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets scientists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single, tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.
One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
Editor's Note
Averting a disaster…
In her Pulitzer Prize-winning book, “The Sixth Extinction,” Elizabeth Kolbert opened our eyes to human-caused environmental devastation. In her new book, “Under a White Sky,” Kolbert tackles the urgent issue of finding ways to reverse the damage done. She investigates possible solutions born of the very human ingenuity that got us into trouble in the first place. Could these innovations avert disastrous climate change? Or dig us into a deeper hole?
Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. She has also been awarded two National Magazine Awards for her writing at The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1999, and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.
More audiobooks from Elizabeth Kolbert
H Is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5The Hidden Life of Ice: Dispatches from a Disappearing World Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sixth Extinction Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5The Sixth Extinction Tenth Anniversary Edition Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5
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Reviews for Under a White Sky
160 ratings6 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Phenomenal book with excellent dramaturgical structure. I would and will recommend this book to anyone living on planet earth right now. It not only gives you perspective on climate change but also the global impact going far beyond a just-school understanding of wildfires and melting icecaps considering natural habitats that are not usually in the layman persons scope. It gives you the necessary tools for a paradigm-change that simply has to happen. This is a book I especially encourage all people of climate movement-affiliation to listen to as well, because it -without being simply hope-driven- combats in a way the hopelessnes that the oftentimes depressingly fatalistic realities can create in our minds.
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- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5A tough book to read, from the standpoint of understanding just these few problems we're facing, knowing there are so many more, and that our time is limited to push for the political will to act. But also reassuring to know how many people are working on extremely complex solutions. I wish I had Elizabeth Kolbert's hope for the future. I'll try.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Perhaps the author advocates geoengeneering as the last tool for humans to avert the worst of global warming. In my view this whole idea is wrong, take a look into the examples of Louisiana, New Orleans or The Greak Lakes for further information. The book makes a nice recount of some human interventions on nature, usually, for the worse. Does she imagine that with geoengeneering would be different?
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very well done! I thought the writing and research was marvelous.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Good read would recommend to anyone looking for solutions i
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5A sobering account of how human intervention tries to fix human intervention. Well written and read. A contrast to Bill Gates book, How to avoid a climate disaster that presents technology as the best answer. This one is not solution-based, only enlightening.