under the white sky the nature of the future

Geoengineering is manifestly terrifying, with enormous potential to blow up in our faces. These are projects that scare even those who are working on them. So we are floundering around, striking at seemingly anything in the hopes of blindly hitting some desired target. We feel morally compelled to try to clean up our own messes, or at least reduce the damaging effects on innocents like coral and pupfish and future humans. The magnitude of suffering we have unleashed drives all these undertakings. This is merely the best anyone has come up with in the context of wicked problems that likely have no best solutions. Nobody believes these projects are the best. There is little rosy techno-optimism, quite a bit of grim techno-fatalism. And that is the dilemma.Īs Kolbert says, “This is a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Without exception, the people she talks with are committed to their work, but their passion is hollowed by doubt. Or the skies would be white - whether we’d be living is debatable. If we were to seed the sky with particulates and chemicals to dim the sun and cool the earth, we would be living under white skies. Kolbert dispassionately reports on schemes to mitigate the multiple disasters we have created for ourselves - from climate change and ecological collapse to attempts to save isolated desert pupfish species from extinction.

In Under a White Sky Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, examines the future world we are engineering.

Under the white sky the nature of the future