Image: Lacey Berg
There are two ways to deal with an environmental issue: do nothing, or do something.
We’re at a critical moment in deciding the fate of the planet as we know it. Since we joined the planet’s cast of characters, human activity has changed the course of rivers, driven species to extinction, and altered the composition of the atmosphere. Climate scientists have identified a 2 degrees Celsius increase in the planet’s average temperature as a tipping point beyond which climate catastrophe is unavoidable. “Business as usual” is projected to raise average global temperatures by 5 or 6 degrees Celsius.
But we aren’t totally doomed. In the past year, I’ve witnessed humanity weather a pandemic and widespread political unrest. Through all of the worst parts of it, I learned that like it or not, we’re here to stay on this planet and the least we can do is try to make life better.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, Under a White Sky, examines what happens when someone decides to do something to make life better. You might recognize her dry humor and candid descriptions of frightening climate scenarios from her 2014 Pulitzer Prize winning book The Sixth Extinction. Under a White Sky continues to explore how people have changed the earth.
She argues that human civilization is essentially an experiment in defying nature that has entirely reshaped the world. Since the advent of agriculture, people have been making large-scale changes to their environments in the hopes of improvement. Welcome to the Anthropocene, a proposed geological epoch defined by the impact of human activity.
Ten thousand years later, Kolbert examines how “people try to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”
Kolbert chronicles some truly ingenious human interventions in nature: electrifying the Chicago River to kill invasive carp, building a replica of a unique hot spring in California to save a rare fish, and breeding “super corals” that can withstand marine heat waves, to name just a few. Spoiler alert: none of these ideas went according to plan.
The great limitation to the remarkable cleverness of people is that we can’t predict the future. Imagine explaining the consequences of planting some grains to somebody 10,000 years ago. Now try to imagine what humanity might look like 10,000 years from now. Kolbert proposes enormous philosophical, existential questions, then inserts her voice to remind readers of what it’s really like to live in the world every day. We’re ill-equipped to answer questions of thousand year consequences when thinking about what’s for dinner feels like planning in advance.
But we can try. And we do try. And we will continue to try.
Under a White Sky ends with a cutting edge idea for saving the planet: solar geoengineering. Solar geoengineering sounds simple enough: block out some sunlight to keep the planet from warming too much. Many people are philosophically opposed to geoengineering because of the dangers of “playing god,” but we already live in a world that’s been fundamentally altered by human presence and activity.
Instead of asking whether or not we should blast sulfates into the stratosphere, Kolbert wonders what it would be like to live under a white sky, in a world with a little less sun. She calls on history for a little clarity. In 1815, Mount Tambora erupted in Indonesia, killing tens of thousands of people and filling the stratosphere with sulfur dioxide, one of the compounds popular among geoengineering researchers. The eruption had cascading effects worldwide. 1816 was known in New England as the “year without a summer.” Crops froze in Massachusetts in August. The gloom inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. There were also brilliant sunsets.
Dan Schrag, a geoengineering researcher at Harvard, tells Kolbert “people have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar geoengineering or not.” In his view, “the highest priority for scientists is to figure out all the different ways this could go wrong.”
And there are so many ways it could go wrong. While scientists make recommendations about geoengineering, ultimately the implementation of any project will be a political decision. How will governments address issues of environmental justice when implementing geoengineering? Who will fly the planes that spray sulfates into the atmosphere? Where will they spray them? When will they stop?
My argument for geoengineering boils down to this: we’re probably screwed anyway, so we might as well try. But I read this book on a series of brilliantly sunny spring afternoons, and I shivered thinking about how awful the weather would have to be to inspire Frankenstein. Even though Kolbert’s frank and funny tone steers the narrative away from nihilism, I’m left wondering if humanity could survive a dark age.
In the final pages of the book, Kolbert uses ice cores from Greenland to reveal the surprising history of earth’s climate. Air bubbles in the ice cores are time capsules for thousands of years of climate history. The past ten thousand years have been fairly stable, climate-wise, save for the centuries since the Industrial Revolution. But before the last ice age ended, the climate fluctuated wildly; temperatures swung up and down by as much as 8 degrees Celsius at least 25 times in a period of about 3,000 years.
Human civilization’s short history coincides perfectly with a stable climate, a novelty we’ve mistaken for the norm. Now, we have to figure out how to define our future on an unfamiliar planet.
Kolbert’s conclusion departs from more traditional environmental sentiments about restoring nature. The world is different now than it used to be– we changed it. In the future, the world will be different than it is now. Maybe we’ll embrace geoengineering to help stabilize the climate. For all the things that go wrong, I think we owe it to ourselves to also imagine how things could go right.