Under A White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert
A stock response from climate deniers (or people who haven’t really thought about climate change very much and just don’t like activists) is that the climate has always changed. Until the end of the last ice age, about 11000 years ago, that was true. But over this 11000 year period, the climate has been remarkably stable. This is the period during which all the activities of human civilisation have taken place; the development of farming, the rise of settled communities, construction, nation-building, medicine, science and philosophy. Everything we recognise about our lives today began in the Holocene Period since the ice retreated and the climate stabilised.
This book is about humanity seized this incredible opportunity and screwed it up.
Kolbert has assembled a collection of curiosities from around the world. Curiosities that genuinely call into question the collective decision-making skills of the Earth’s dominant species. Like the massive engineering effort required to reverse the Chicago river and prevent all the human waste dumped into it fouling Lake Michigan, the source of freshwater for the city of Chicago. Or the ongoing madness of trying to keep the city of New Orleans from being consumed by the active and constantly changing river system that surrounds it. How about the multi-million dollar efforts to save a species of pupfish whose entire global population would fit in a bucket?
Civilisation, the process of creating an ordered, stable society is usually presented as a positive movement, a process by which we all live longer, get better educated, are wealthier and have better lives. There can be no denying this progress, but it has come at a cost. As humanity has been able to bring greater resources to the efforts to reshape the natural world, many of the projects are poorly thought out and motivated by short-term motives like vanity, personal prestige and profit.
The worst of this thinking is to use the atmosphere, waterways and seas of the world as the dumping ground for our waste products, both personal and industrial. This attitude has led us to the current climate crisis.
Kolbert’s parade of curiosities reminds us that the same species responsible for these monumental mistakes now wants to engage in even more grandiose schemes to mitigate the effects of climate change.
Genetically modified species lose in nature to combat a transmissible disease. Diamond dust shot into the atmosphere to reflect the sun’s energy back into space. The burial of millions of trees to sequester their carbon forever. These actions are all under consideration as responses to the climate crisis, despite no one really knowing what the consequences of these actions might be. We would be experimenting with the only climate in the universe known to support life. If we screw up, we screw up the climate and the atmosphere. Unfortunately, we have a strong record of screwing up.
Kolbert describes the book as being about “people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems”. A very concise summary. The inquisitive tone of Kolbert’s writing prevents the book from being depressing. But the implications of the book are deeply disturbing. Governments and corporations, when they talk about the climate crisis at all, talk about grandiose techno-fixes. Yet this is precisely the approach that has got us where we are. A recognition of our own fallibility is never spoken of and so desperately needed. Solving the climate crisis would seem to require a humility that historically we have been unable to demonstrate that we possess.
