To say that the 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,” Elizabeth Kolbert warns readers in her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. Kolbert has been studying the consequences of humankind’s impact on the planet for decades as a contributor to The New Yorker and as the author of 2015’s Pulitzer Prize–winning The Sixth Extinction. Now she examines an emerging pattern that she attributes to “the recursive logic of the Anthropocene”: human interventions that attempt to correct past interventions in the environment. “The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature,” Kolbert writes, “but to what end?”
—Naomi Elias
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