Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

The central theme of the book is that humans have altered the planet so extensively in our drive to control nature that the only way forward is through further attempts at control. Other important themes include the unintended and oftentimes devastating consequences of control measures, and the inequities in who experiences the brunt of these consequences (contrasting with who initiated the damage). The opening section establishes the style of the book: Kolbert explores the theme of control through the narrative device of the river and the characters and communities whose lives unfold around it.

Kolbert writes poetically about people, events, and landscapes, positioning herself as a direct observer and interlocutor in order to animate these elements of the book. In the opening chapter, Kolbert describes her trip on the ship City Living down the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, with a group called the Friends of the Chicago River. Kolbert describes the canal as “flecked with candy wrappers and bits of Styrofoam,” and winding through “past mountains of road salt, mesas of scrap metal, moraines of rusted shipping containers” (4). In this passage, Kolbert is inviting the reader to contemplate the extent of humanity’s modification of the planet, by contrasting descriptions of the history of the Canal—which was an unprecedented feat of engineering when it was built—with lyrical observations on the state of the canal today, in which human landscapes (“mesas of scrap metal”) have replaced natural ones. As this passage shows, such landscapes are poor imitations of their real counterparts—a motif that will recur throughout the book.

Chapter 1 also considers the philosophical underpinnings of the drive to control: the belief that humans should control nature, and not the other way around—Kolbert quotes a biblical passage in which man’s dominion over the earth is prophesized to demonstrate just how deeply entrenched this view is in Western culture. By the 21st century, humans have become the dominant force shaping the trajectory of the planet; humans outweigh all wild mammals by a factor of eight to one, and the cumulative effects of humanity are now so significant that some call this a new geological era, the Anthropocene. This success of the human species has dire consequences: “atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication” (7). These planetary effects begin at the local level, as humans work to control their environment without foreseeing secondary and tertiary effects. For instance, the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal solved a major problem—the contamination of Chicago’s water supply by the city’s waste—but it also opened up a channel for the transmission of invasive species. Solving this new problem means ever-continuing control: the electrification of rivers, barrier defense fishing expeditions, and carp fishing festivals. People will go far to control nature rather than changing anything about their lives: the threat to the Great Lakes could best be solved by re-creating a barrier between the two drainage systems, but given the extensive social changes that separation would require, this is politically impossible.

Kolbert also explores the theme of unintended consequences: the extensive modifications humans have made to the planet have made it so that even attempts to fix problems can ultimately pose other issues. The Asian carp that pose an imminent threat to the Great Lakes were introduced as a biological control measure. Such measures rely on the use of one species to control the spread of another and were originally advocated for by environmentalists like Rachel Carson, author of the influential environmental text Silent Spring, over concerns with the effects that indiscriminate chemical use was having on ecosystems. But bio-control measures in turn cause their own problems. Other unintended consequences include the reshaping of the Mississippi River, which was designed to limit the destructive impact of flooding on human settlements. However, ending a pattern of flooding that existed for thousands of years is accelerating land loss in Louisiana; without a constant supply of sediment to renew the soil, land in the state is compacting and disappearing underwater.

Western society is driving the destruction now affecting many parts of the planet. Humanity did not participate equally in creating climate change and environmental harm at the planetary level, and some groups are now experiencing the consequences more than others. In the Mississippi delta, when French settlers founded New Orleans, they refused to retreat from the region’s regular floods as Indigenous inhabitants did. Rather, they chose to build hard barriers, with enslaved Africans doing the backbreaking work. This pattern of Western culture ignoring Indigenous knowledge that emphasized accommodation of the natural world and instead exploiting others to control nature continues in the present day in places like Isle de Jean Charles, whose mostly Indigenous residents will be forced to relocate due to land loss, despite having been forced onto the Isle by white settlers and after not having been consulted in the projects that led to land loss: “They’d been excluded from the efforts to control the Mississippi, and now that new forms of control were being imposed to counter the effects of the old, they were being excluded from those, too” (56).