The Nation Magazine
Will We Ever Fully Understand Humans’ Impact on Nature?
A conversation with Elizabeth Kolbert about her new book, efforts to
“control the control of nature,” and how the climate beat has changed.
By Naomi Elias
TODAY 5:45 AM
To say that Earth is in crisis is an understatement. “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,” journalist Elizabeth Kolbert
warns us about in her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the
Future. Kolbert has been studying the consequences of humanity’s impact
on Earth for decades as a contributor to The New Yorker and as the
author of such books as the 2015 Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sixth
Extinction, an exploration of the concept of extinction that posits
mankind as a cataclysm as great as the asteroid that annihilated the
dinosaurs.
In Under a White Sky, Kolbert ponders the nature of the future by
examining a new pattern she attributes to “the recursive logic of the
Anthropocene”: human interventions attempting to answer for past human
interventions in the environment. The book chronicles the casualties of
short-sighted human meddling with the planet and its resources and the
present-day efforts being made to address that meddling—or, as Kolbert
puts it, efforts to “control the control of nature.” Interviews with
scientists in a wide array of disciplines—climate scientists, climate
entrepreneurs, biologists, glaciologists, and geneticists—reveal a trend
of projects aiming to transform nature in order to save it. From the
Mojave to lava fields in Iceland, Kolbert takes readers on a
globe-spanning journey to explore these projects while weighing their
pros, cons, and ethical implications (the book’s title refers to the way
the sky could be bleached of color as a potential side effect of solar
geoengineering, one of the proposed interventions to combat global
warming). “The issue, at this point,” Kolbert writes, “is not whether
we’re going to alter nature, but to what end?”
I spoke to Kolbert over the phone the day after President Joe Biden’s
inauguration. We talked about what it’s like to write a book about a big
question you don’t yet have the answer to, and what it will take to undo
the environmental damage incurred during the Trump years.
—Naomi Elias
NAOMI ELIAS: You describe Under A White Sky as “a book about people
trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.”
Can you explain that a little?
ELIZABETH KOLBERT: The pattern that I’m looking at in the book is ways
in which humans have intervened—or, if you prefer, mucked around
with—the natural world and then have decided that the consequences are
bad and are now looking for new forms of intervention to try to solve
those problems. I start with the example of the Chicago River, which was
reversed in an extraordinary engineering project at the beginning of the
20th century. The Chicago River used to flow east into Lake Michigan,
which also happened to be Chicago’s only source of drinking water. All
of Chicago’s human and animal waste flowed into Lake Michigan and there
were constant outbreaks of typhoid and cholera. So Chicago decided,
Well, we really have to do something about it, and what they did was
this incredible engineering project, and now it flows basically to the
southwest and eventually into the Mississippi, and all of Chicago’s
waste flows in the same direction. When the canal that reversed the
river was put into place, there was a headline in The New York Times
that ran something like, “Water Flows in the Chicago River Again.” It
was so thick with muck that people joked a chicken could walk across it
without getting its feet wet. That created a big problem that connected
two huge drainage systems, the Great Lakes drainage system and the
Mississippi drainage system, that has now led to all these species,
including many invasive species, crossing from one basin into the other.
It was having bad effects on the ecology of both systems, so to try to
prevent these species from crossing from one basin to the other, they’ve
now electrified a significant chunk of this canal. So that’s an
intervention, as it were, on top of an intervention, and that is really
the pattern that the book explores.
NE: The book visits project sites in Iceland, Australia, New Orleans,
and the California desert. What drew you to the projects you write about?
EK: The first project that got me started down this whole path was the
“super coral” project, which is currently in Hawaii and partly in
Australia. As the oceans warm, corals are having a lot of trouble
surviving. We get these coral-bleaching events that I’m sure people have
heard about. Some scientists were looking at how we can save coral reefs
and the idea they came up with was that we need to intervene and try to
coax along evolution so that these creatures can survive climate change.
That struck me as a really interesting project, and got me thinking
about this question of, Can we intervene to redress our own
interventions? Once I started seeing that pattern, I started to see it
everywhere. I could have gone to many different parts of the world and
written stories that made the same point, but the projects that I went
to were emblematic in some way. They were taking on different issues
like climate change or invasive species, the loss of wetlands—the list
goes on.
NE: Did any of these efforts—be it the Harvard team trying to combat
global warming by firing diamonds into the stratosphere or the group
looking to reduce rodent populations with genetic manipulation—convince
you that our best chance of averting climate apocalypse really is to
“control the control of nature”? Are we digging ourselves out of a hole
or just digging a deeper one?
EK: You know, you have identified the question at the center of the
book. That is a question that I don’t claim to answer. I’m not a
prophet. I’m really trying to tease out that question in the book. Look
at it, and have some fun with it, to be honest, and get people to think
about the pattern. In many cases, these solutions are working to a
certain extent. New Orleans would not exist without massive human
intervention to solve the problems of water. In New Orleans—a city
that’s essentially significantly below sea level—it turns out you need
flooding to keep the land from subsiding even further because that’s
actually what built the land, the flooding that dropped a lot of
sediment across the Mississippi Delta over many millennia. Are you
getting into a trap when you pile these interventions on top of each
other? Do you have alternatives? These are the big questions of our time.
NE: I’d like to talk about your feelings about the popular phrase for
the geological epoch we’re living in, the Anthropocene. In 2017 you gave
a lecture at Manhattan’s New School, in which you said, “Thinking
scientifically about man’s place in the world used to mean acknowledging
our insignificance.” This new human-centered term, “the age of man,”
completely upends that. Can you talk about your feelings about the term
and what it means for how we think about our relationship to the Earth?
EK: I think we are at this interesting turning point that’s on some
level been the subject of all the books I’ve written, and a lot of the
articles as well. We first decentered humans, right? It wasn’t that the
sun revolved around the Earth, it was that the Earth revolved around the
sun. There’s a lot of these discoveries that have proved people are not
the center of the universe, but then we get to the present moment, where
we do have to acknowledge that we are becoming the dominant force in
many very essential ways. We have to acknowledge that and, on some
level, take responsibility for that. This term, the Anthropocene, is
kind of a shorthand for all the ways that humans are affecting the Earth
on what is sometimes called a geological scale. We are changing the
carbon cycle very dramatically, we’re changing the nitrogen cycle, we’re
acidifying the ocean. We’ve even got to the point where we regularly
cause earthquakes. We are definitely driving evolution; we are probably
driving speciation. We are at this moment of tremendous human impact and
we need to rise to that challenge of thinking about what we want the
world to look like now that we are such a dominant force.
NE: In the book, you take note of the way the scientists you speak to
encode a sense of moral urgency into their analysis of the climate
crisis, which is something I feel present in contemporary climate
reporting too. You’ve been on the climate beat for decades. Have you
felt a shift in the work? Do you feel like you now have an agenda when
you write?
EK: There’s definitely been a shift in the sense that, when I started
out almost 20 years ago, there was still, among a lot of pretty
knowledgeable people, a lot of confusion. What is climate change? Is it
real? Do I have to worry about it? The conversation has moved
dramatically, at least in a big chunk of the US and a big chunk of the
world. But I do not consider myself an advocate. I’m a journalist and I
try to report stories that I think illuminate the situation that we’re
in. I’ve thought about, you know, Should I be writing some sort of
prescriptive journalism? But that’s not really me.
NE: At the end of that same 2017 lecture you conclude, “We are the fate
of Earth.” You call humans ethical agents and say that we’re failing as
ethical agents if we don’t acknowledge our impact.
EK: Yes, I certainly stand by those words. I mean, this book is on the
one hand grappling with, on the other hand sort of playing around with,
those questions. Our impact on the planet and the untold number of other
species with whom we share the planet and whom we frankly don’t spend a
lot of time thinking about—and don’t even understand to a great extent—I
think will come to be seen as one of the great tragedies and the great
ethical failings of humanity.
NE: So many of the things you discuss in the book were set in motion
long before the 2016 election, but it’s hard to overstate what a setback
the last four years of the Trump administration have been for the
climate. An analysis from The New York Times cites over 100
environmental protections Trump reversed concerning areas like wetland
and wildlife protection, and air and water pollution. In his
inauguration speech yesterday, President Biden talked about answering
the “cry for survival” Earth was letting out, and he immediately signed
an order to rejoin the Paris climate accord. I’m wondering what your
thoughts are on what your job is going to look like under the Biden
administration, and if you think we dodged some kind of metaphorical
asteroid?
EK: I think what Trump did was egregious. It was an attempt to set us
off completely on the wrong trajectory. It’s a very complicated
situation legally because now a lot of regulations will have to be
rewritten. It’s going to occupy the EPA for years, unfortunately. That’s
very sad and just a waste of time and of human effort, when we should be
doing a lot of other things. But, you know, there are great forces at
work here and fortunately some of those continue to go in the right
direction, like the tremendous decrease in prices of wind power and
solar power that continued despite Donald Trump’s best efforts to try to
undermine renewable power. One could spend the next four years doing
nothing but looking at the legal ins and outs of trying to undo that,
and I think that that would be a noble thing to do. What I’m thinking
about are—I don’t want to call them bigger questions, but they’re the
questions of our human impact on the planet, which are not going to
change because Joe Biden suddenly rejoined the Paris Agreement,
unfortunately.
Naomi Eliasis a writer based in Los Angeles. Her work has appeared in
The Brooklyn Rail, Longreads, the Los Angeles Review of Books, and
elsewhere.
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Groups.io Links: You receive all messages sent to this group.
View/Reply Online (#6062): https://groups.io/g/marxmail/message/6062
Mute This Topic: https://groups.io/mt/80352664/21656
-=-=-
POSTING RULES & NOTES
#1 YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message.
#2 This mail-list, like most, is publicly & permanently archived.
#3 Subscribe and post under an alias if #2 is a concern.
-=-=-
Group Owner: [email protected]
Unsubscribe: https://groups.io/g/marxmail/leave/8674936/1316126222/xyzzy
[[email protected]]
-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
