Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

Staff Top Fives 2020-2021

Our favorite books of 2020-2021.

Powell's Picks of the Month

Hot new releases and under-the-radar gems for adults and kids.

Elizabeth Kolbert examines the ways human intervention has caused environmental devastation. And yet, further intervention seems all that will mitigate the consequences. Don't we have a responsibility to explore any and all measures to save the environment? To what degree do we have the right? Recommended By Abigail R., Powells.com

Kolbert turns her attention to the environmentalists, scientists, and activists who are working to mitigate the damage that human control of nature has caused, to take "control of the control of nature." The result is a hopeful book that highlights the efforts already underway without losing sight of the frightening scope of the challenge. Recommended By Emily B., Powells.com

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it?

That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. She meets scientists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single, tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave. She visits a lava field in Iceland, where engineers are turning carbon emissions to stone; an aquarium in Australia, where researchers are trying to develop “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and a lab at Harvard, where physicists are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere in order to reflect sunlight back to space and cool the earth.

One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.

"This investigation of global change is brilliantly executed and urgently necessary." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review)

Watch the Powell’s virtual event with Elizabeth Kolbert and Bill McKibben!

Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. For her work at The New Yorker, where she’s a a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.