The Read: Elizabeth Kolbert, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
Friday's Child Is Loving and Giving
Why did I get this book?
It’s directly relevant to some long-form writing that I am doing now.
I also teach a course on the history of the future and I’m always on the lookout for new futurist writings that I might use near the end of the semester in the next version of the class. Environmental futures seem especially important (and there’s quite a few books of this kind to choose from).
Is it what I thought it was?
Sort of? It’s a kind of futurism that avoids the usual risks of futurism by being firmly set in the present—it’s a tour of where the Anthropocene is going via where it is right now. I wasn’t always swept along by the subject transitions, though: at times it feels as if Kolbert closed her eyes and put dots on the map and went there. Which arguably is a pretty fair way to get a sense of the Anthropocene’s unfolding—it is in some sense visible everywhere and in everything.
What continuing uses might I have for it?
I could see using it in my history of the future class, but I’d probably privilege other works that are more aggressively or insistently “futuristic”, whether fictions like The Water Knife or nonfiction like The World Without Us.
Quotes
“An obvious lesson to draw from this turn of events is: be careful what you wish for. Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success.”
“But no one who spoke up for ‘hydrologic separation’ said they thought it would ever happen. To re-replumb Chicago would mean rerouting the city’s boat traffic, redesigning its flood controls, and revamping its sewage-treatment system. There were too many constituencies with a vested interest in the way things were.”
“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.”
“Consider the ‘synanthrope.’ This is an animal that has not yet 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…include raccoons, American crows, Norway rats, Asian carp, house mice, and a couple of dozen species of cockroach.”
“One way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it. The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big. The impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like seventy-five percent of all species on earth. No one wept for them, and eventually, new species evolved to take their place. But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid. And so we’ve created another class of animals. These are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back.”
“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.”
“No one can say exactly how hot the world can get before an out-and-out disaster—the inundation of a populous country like Bangladesh, say, or the collapse of crucial ecosystems like coral reefs—becomes inevitable.”
“This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems. In the course of reporting it, I spoke to engineers and genetic engineers, biologists and microbiologists, atmospheric scientists and atmospheric entrepreneurs. Without exception, they were enthusiastic about their work. But, as a rule, this enthusiasm was tempered by doubt.”
Commentary, asides, loose thoughts, unfair complaints
Kolbert has a great command over “telling details”—something I think is characteristic of the best science writing and of great writing about public policy. It’s on view right away in the book with a close treatment of the intricacies involved in the management of the Chicago River and its relationship to Lake Michigan, and where attempts to use more and more elaborate systems of control to manage the consequences of the Anthropocene (in this case, the movement and management of invasive fish species, most particularly Asian carp) feels both urgent and absurd. (The most oh-my moment for me was hearing that deboning Asian carp to make it appealing to American consumers requires human labor but that to hit a plausible price point this means freezing fish caught in Louisiana, shipping them to Vietnam, having Vietnamese workers process the carp, freezing them again and sending them back to New Orleans.) This kind of detailed exploration of particular systems ends up illustrating what it really means to talk about the Anthropocene: human beings and their domesticates and their structures may now be the central causality of speciation, extinction, environmental change, climatic change, etc. but nobody should misunderstand that as a modernist vision of rational control over nature. We are being acted upon (along with all life and the entirety of the world) by our systems but we do not in any meaningful sense control them.
As I said, it follows a template that’s common in a lot of science reporting, which is to build the work around concrete projects, experiments and collaborations developed by scientists, engineers and experts and to use their voices as a way to anchor the analysis in concrete situations. I like that kind of writing but it has a way of getting stuck to the examples a bit, making it harder to generalize or abstract from them. It also tends to privilege perspectives that are devoted still to our fading aspirations for control, intervention, and repair. It’s just my taste, I guess, but I like a bit of philosophy and cultural perspective in the mix—the question of what the Anthropocene means to people, will mean to people, seems more important than ever (and has a lot to do with the politics that makes many possible interventions so unlikely or difficult.) The question of how to balance doomcasting with the possibility of technological interventions is also a very live one in environmental politics. Kolbert isn’t promoting interventions like geoengineering and so on but the feeling is generally pretty optimistic because most of her interlocutors have a lot invested in the work they’re doing. She is attentive to their skepticism within that context, but it just seems to me there’s a huge surrounding terrain of philosophers, complexity scientists, historians, anthropologists, STS scholars, etc. who really ought to be brought into the picture to put this kind of work into context.
I’m also surprised at the sharp boundaries in this account that box out much consideration of capitalism as a global system (surely people talking about degrowth, etc., are interesting to consider even in a purely technical sense) and also how much the book stays in familiar Western settings—for a book with global implications it’s limited to sites and work that are friendly and accessible for a science-oriented writer. Ultimately the book feels a bit slender and under-thought: Kolbert doesn’t really push to any incisive conclusions (or even some indecisive grappling) about trying to control the unintended consequences of past efforts to control the environment, about the nature of the Anthropocene, etc.; this feels to some extent like a coda or companion to The Sixth Extinction rather than a fully-realized book. Or perhaps more it feels like what it is, which is a collection of long-form pieces from the New Yorker, where the sum is a bit less than the parts.