Chapter 1
The Paradox of Human Control: Engineering Our Way Through Ecological Crisis
Have you ever considered that our attempts to fix the environment might be making things worse? Elizabeth Kolbert's "Under a White Sky" takes readers on a global journey through humanity's most ambitious environmental engineering projects, revealing a troubling paradox: the more we try to control nature, the more control we seem to need. The book has become something of a modern environmental classic, praised by Barack Obama as one of his favorite books of 2021 and winning the California Book Award. Its title refers to a potential future where our atmosphere is so engineered that the sky itself turns white from reflective particles designed to cool our overheated planet. With her characteristic blend of meticulous reporting and wry humor, Pulitzer Prize-winner Kolbert shows us that in the Anthropocene-our human-dominated geological epoch-the line between saving nature and replacing it has become dangerously blurred.
Chapter 2
The River That Flows Backward: Chicago's Massive Hydrological Experiment
The Chicago River stands as perhaps humanity's most audacious attempt to control water. In the early 20th century, engineers accomplished something that would have seemed miraculous to previous generations: they reversed an entire river's flow. This wasn't a small creek but a significant waterway that had defined Chicago's development. The city's "Sanitary and Ship Canal" represented the era's largest public works project, requiring new earth-moving technologies and displacing 43 million cubic yards of material-all to flush Chicago's waste away from Lake Michigan toward the Mississippi.
This massive intervention solved one problem but created cascading consequences that upended the hydrology of two-thirds of the United States. Today, we face the unintended results of this engineering marvel: invasive species moving between previously separate watersheds. The Army Corps of Engineers now operates electric fish barriers on the canal, creating graduated electric fields to prevent Asian carp from reaching the Great Lakes. These barriers represent our latest attempt to control nature with more control-what Kolbert calls our "no-analog predicament."
The Asian carp story illustrates the compounding nature of ecological interventions. These fish-actually four different Chinese species collectively known as the "four famous domestic fishes"-arrived in America partly because of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring, which advocated biological controls instead of chemicals. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service imported grass carp in 1963 to manage aquatic weeds, while silver and bighead carp were introduced to control nutrients in sewage treatment ponds. Both efforts backfired spectacularly when the fish escaped into the Mississippi River system.
Today, these carp dominate many waterways, comprising up to 75% of fish biomass in some areas. Silver carp, infamous for leaping from the water when startled by boat motors, have injured numerous boaters-one fisherman described being knocked unconscious, while another had "lost count" of his carp injuries. Their ecological impact is equally dramatic, outcompeting native species and threatening North America's diverse freshwater mussel populations. As one journalist observed, they don't just invade ecosystems-"they conquer them."
Chapter 3
The Disappearing Delta: Louisiana's Land Loss Crisis
Flying over Louisiana's coast reveals a shocking reality: what appears on maps as a thick, muscular arm thrust into the Gulf is actually an emaciated limb. Plaquemines Parish, the southeasternmost tip of Louisiana, is practically all river with just two skinny strips of land clinging to its banks. Beyond these strips lies only open water and patchy marsh, crisscrossed with channels dug for oil extraction.
This region has the dubious distinction of being among the fastest-disappearing places on earth. NOAA has officially retired thirty-one place names in Plaquemines Parish because those places no longer exist. Every hour and a half, another football field's worth of land vanishes; every few minutes, a tennis court's worth. The boot-shaped state now has its sole, heel, and much of its instep in tatters.
The essential cause of this "land-loss crisis" is the very engineering marvel built to protect the region: thousands of miles of levees and flood control structures that have "harnessed, straightened, regularized, shackled" the Mississippi. Before flood control engineering, spring surges would spread millions of tons of sediment across thousands of square miles, creating new soil to counter natural subsidence. Now, thanks to floodgates and spillways, there's no spillover, no havoc, and crucially, no land-building.
The history of human intervention began with the French, who founded New Orleans in 1718 and called it "L'Isle de la Nouvelle Orleans" for its watery surroundings. When the settlement flooded the very next year, rather than retreat, they built artificial levees atop the natural ones formed by river sediment-work largely performed by enslaved Africans. By the 1730s, slave-built levees stretched nearly fifty miles along both banks, establishing an enduring pattern: rather than moving to accommodate the river, humans would force the river to stay put.
Today, Louisiana's Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) is attempting to solve problems caused by previous interventions with even more ambitious engineering. Their "bold" solution involves punching ten giant holes through Mississippi and Atchafalaya levees-gated, channelized openings to "reestablish the natural sediment deposition process," though only in the sense that electrifying a river might be called natural.
Chapter 4
Sinking Cities and Rising Waters: New Orleans' Precarious Future
New Orleans, nicknamed both the "Crescent City" and the "bowl," is sinking beneath its residents' feet at one of the fastest rates on earth-almost half a foot per decade in some areas, with some neighborhoods sinking even faster. Evidence of subsidence appears everywhere-enormous potholes that can swallow entire cars, manhole covers protruding like medieval turrets above street level, and once-elevated neighborhoods now sitting fifteen feet below sea level. Historic buildings that once stood proudly at street level now require steps down to their entrances, while century-old oak trees lean precariously as their root systems shift in the unstable soil.
The city's celebrated drainage system, pioneered by A. Baldwin Wood's revolutionary Screw Pumps in 1920, has become what coastal geologist Alex Kolker calls a "Trojan solution." By pumping water out of marshy soils, the system accelerates compaction and sinking, creating a vicious feedback loop: "The more water that's pumped, the faster the city sinks. And the more it sinks, the more pumping is required." This system, once hailed as engineering genius, now processes over 250 billion gallons annually through its network of 24 pumping stations and 13,000 drainage pipes.
Hurricane Katrina, striking in August 2005, wasn't even a worst-case scenario for New Orleans, yet it proved catastrophic. The storm drove water into the city's eastern shipping channels, causing multiple levee failures on the Industrial Canal that sent a twenty-foot wall of water through the Lower Ninth Ward at speeds reaching 8 feet per second. As water surged into Lake Pontchartrain and back through drainage canals, floodwalls collapsed along three major canals, leaving 80% of the city underwater for weeks. Over 1,800 people lost their lives, and property damage exceeded $125 billion.
In the aftermath, experts like geophysicist Klaus Jacob advocated for "carefully planned deconstruction" of the city, suggesting vulnerable areas could become "a city of boathouses" while allowing the Mississippi to refill the bowl with fresh sediment naturally. But retreat, though geophysically sensible, was politically impossible in a city deeply rooted in its location and culture. Instead, the Corps built even more massive structures: the $1.1 billion West Closure Complex with the world's largest pumping station (capable of filling an Olympic pool in four seconds) and the $1.3 billion Lake Borgne Surge Barrier, stretching nearly two miles across the Golden Triangle marsh.
These pharaonic defenses have kept the city dry through recent storms but may ultimately prove a trap as coastal land loss brings the Gulf twenty miles closer to the city-effectively raising storm surge threats by seven feet. Louisiana loses a football field worth of wetlands every 100 minutes, eliminating crucial natural storm barriers. Meanwhile, communities like Isle de Jean Charles, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, have already lost 98% of their land since 1955, shrinking from 22,000 acres to just 320. These communities serve as a stark warning of what awaits New Orleans if current trends continue, forcing difficult conversations about adaptation versus retreat in America's most vulnerable major city.
Chapter 5
The Devils in the Details: Preserving Earth's Rarest Fish
In the scorching heat of Death Valley, a team of biologists carefully counts one of Earth's rarest creatures-the Devils Hole pupfish. These sapphire blue, inch-long fish inhabit what is believed to be the smallest range of any vertebrate-a 60-foot-long, 8-foot-wide pool that serves as a portal to a vast underground aquifer. First discovered by gold-seekers in 1849, these fish have become a symbol of conservation in the Anthropocene.
The entire Devils Hole pupfish population weighs about 100 grams total-slightly less than a McDonald's Filet-O-Fish sandwich. They've evolved to survive in harsh 93F water with low oxygen levels, conditions that would be fatal to most fish. This stressful environment likely caused them to lose their pelvic fins, as producing extra appendages wasn't worth the energy expenditure.
The pupfish's troubles coincide with the dawn of the Anthropocene. In January 1952, President Truman added Devils Hole to Death Valley National Park specifically to protect this "peculiar race of desert fish." That same spring, the Department of Defense began detonating nuclear bombs at the Nevada Test Site just 50 miles north. As development encroached, groundwater pumping for agriculture threatened the pupfish's habitat, dropping water levels dramatically and shrinking their spawning area.
After a landmark Supreme Court case that divided Nevadans between those with "Save the Pupfish" and "Kill the Pupfish" bumper stickers, the fish gained legal protection. Today, to preserve the species, scientists have constructed an exact replica of Devils Hole-a $4.5 million concrete reproduction that meticulously recreates the essential conditions for pupfish survival, from water temperature to the contours of their spawning shelf.
This facility employs four full-time staff (roughly one person per thirteen fish) to maintain the artificial environment and manage unexpected complications-like a beetle from the genus Neoclypeodytes that began reproducing rapidly and preying on pupfish larvae. Staff now set daily traps to control the beetles, painstakingly removing each tiny insect with tweezers-a stark reminder that it's far easier to damage an ecosystem than to manage one.
The Devils Hole pupfish exemplifies what might be called a "Stockholm species"-utterly dependent on its former persecutors. Such conservation-reliant species now number in the thousands, requiring interventions from captive breeding to predator-avoidance training, blurring the line between preservation and perpetual life support.
Chapter 6
Super Coral and Assisted Evolution: Designing Reefs for a Warming World
Marine biologist Ruth Gates fell in love with the ocean watching Jacques Cousteau on television. During her career spanning from the 1980s through the 2010s, she witnessed the catastrophic decline of coral reefs worldwide-from Caribbean white-band disease to global bleaching events caused by rising ocean temperatures and acidification.
Despite the grim outlook, Gates maintained her self-described "glass half full" perspective. Noticing that some reefs were recovering, she developed the concept of breeding "super coral"-identifying and enhancing traits that made certain corals more resilient to climate change. Her work, supported by a $4 million grant, aimed to use "assisted evolution" to create corals that could survive in our changing oceans.
At Australia's National Sea Simulator near Townsville, researchers are putting these ideas into practice. During the annual coral spawning event, scientist Kate Quigley orchestrates cross-breeding experiments between distant coral colonies that would never naturally mate. Her team collects gamete bundles from different reef regions, manually separates eggs and sperm, then creates specific crosses to produce heat-resistant offspring. These embryos later face stress tests and symbiont inoculation to identify "the best of the best" for reef restoration.
This approach draws inspiration from Charles Darwin, who was similarly fascinated by coral reefs. Darwin's groundbreaking explanation of how atolls form-as coral grows upward around sinking volcanoes-became his first major scientific work, published the same month he sketched his revolutionary ideas about evolution. Darwin believed evolution occurred too gradually to observe directly, so he turned to pigeon breeding as evidence for his theory of natural selection, reasoning: "If feeble man can do so much by his powers of artificial selection," there was "no limit to the amount of change" possible through natural selection.
A century and a half later, Darwin's analogy remains compelling, though the boundaries between natural and artificial selection have blurred as human activity-climate change, deforestation, pollution, introduced species-exerts unprecedented selective pressures on the natural world. As Gates explained before her death: "I cannot continue to hope that our planet is not going to change radically. Our project is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural."
Chapter 7
Genetic Interventions: Editing Evolution to Save Ecosystems
In Oakland, California, a company called The Odin sells genetic engineering kits to the public. For $209, I purchased their "bacterial CRISPR and fluorescent yeast combo kit" and successfully created antibiotic-resistant E. coli in my kitchen by replacing a single DNA letter. This democratization of genetic technology reflects how far we've come since the first engineered bacterium in 1973, with CRISPR now allowing scientists to "rewrite the very molecules of life any way we wish."
This technology is being applied to ecological problems like Australia's cane toad invasion. These enormous, warty amphibians were imported to Australia in 1935 to combat beetle grubs threatening sugar cane. Though they failed at this task, the toads thrived, producing millions of offspring and spreading across the continent at an accelerating pace-evolving significantly longer legs that increased their movement from six miles per year to thirty.
What makes cane toads particularly devastating in Australia is their toxicity. When threatened, they release a milky poison that can cause cardiac arrest in predators. Since Australia has no native toads, local wildlife never evolved wariness of them, leading to population crashes in numerous species from freshwater crocodiles to northern quolls.
At the Australian Animal Health Laboratory, researchers are developing genetic solutions. Postdoctoral researcher Caitlin Cooper has created "detox toads" by deleting the gene for bufotoxin hydrolase, the enzyme that amplifies the toad's poison potency. These detoxified toads could serve as educational tools, allowing predators to learn toad avoidance without dying. Cooper is also exploring ways to genetically reduce toad fertility by modifying the gel coat on their eggs.
Even more powerful genetic technologies are emerging through "gene drives"-systems that can spread engineered traits through wild populations at rates exceeding natural inheritance. While standard genetics teaches that each gene variant has a 50% chance of being passed to offspring, driving genes can achieve transmission rates exceeding 90%. Scientists have already created synthetic gene drives in yeast, fruit flies, and mosquitoes.
The first mammal to receive a CRISPR-assisted gene drive will almost certainly be a mouse. Paul Thomas at Adelaide's South Australian Health and Medical Research Institute is developing an "X-shredder" mouse whose Y chromosome carries instructions to destroy X-bearing sperm. Such mice would produce only male offspring, who would themselves produce only sons, creating a growing sex imbalance until no females remain to reproduce. Mathematical models suggest just 100 gene-drive mice could eliminate a population of 50,000 ordinary mice within years.
This technology could address invasive rodents that have devastated island ecosystems worldwide. On Gough Island, mice have been recorded attacking and eating endangered Tristan albatross chicks alive. While conservationists have traditionally used anticoagulant poisons against these invaders, gene drives offer targeted impacts without poison's collateral damage.
Chapter 8
Engineering the Atmosphere: Carbon Removal and Solar Geoengineering
I signed up with Climeworks, a company that promised to scrub my carbon emissions from the air and turn them into stone. After a year of monthly payments, I visited their operation at Iceland's Hellisheii Power Station, where geothermal energy powers direct air capture units that suck in atmospheric CO2. The captured carbon is dissolved in water and injected underground where it mineralizes in basalt rock within months-compressing what would naturally take millennia.
This technology addresses our atmospheric transformation. Since the Industrial Revolution, human CO2 emissions have risen from 15 million tons annually to nearly 40 billion, raising global temperatures by 1.1C and triggering increasingly severe climate impacts. To stay under the 2C threshold for catastrophe requires emissions to approach zero within decades; for 1.5C, within a single decade.
Carbon dioxide removal offers a mathematical solution-"negative emissions" could balance positive ones, potentially allowing us to cross thresholds temporarily before sucking carbon back from the air. However, the scale required is daunting. Physicist Klaus Lackner calculates that 100 million trailer-sized carbon capture units could offset annual emissions-a massive but not impossible undertaking.
The COVID-19 lockdowns of 2020 demonstrated a harsh reality about carbon dioxide: despite a record 17% emissions drop in April, atmospheric CO2 still reached a new high of 417.1 parts per million in May. This illustrates carbon's stubborn persistence-emissions are cumulative, like water filling a bathtub that never drains. Even halving emissions wouldn't reduce CO2 levels; they'd simply rise more slowly.
As emissions reductions prove insufficient, some scientists are researching more radical interventions. Harvard's Solar Geoengineering Research Program is exploring stratospheric aerosol injection-essentially creating artificial volcanoes by spraying reflective particles into the upper atmosphere to cool the planet. The concept builds on observations of volcanic eruptions like Mount Tambora in 1815, which caused global cooling and led to 1816 being known as "the year without summer."
Frank Keutsch, leading Harvard's Stratospheric Controlled Perturbation Experiment (SCoPEx), explains that his anxiety about geoengineering has grown alongside continued climate inaction. He worries that without proper research, we might resort to hasty, poorly understood stratospheric interventions when climate impacts become severe enough that desperate populations demand immediate action.
While geoengineering appears surprisingly feasible-researchers estimate developing specialized aircraft would cost about $2.5 billion, with operating costs around $20 billion per decade-it isn't truly a solution. It addresses symptoms rather than causes, creating dependency as particles must be constantly replenished. If the program were suddenly halted, "termination shock" would occur as all masked warming manifested at once.
Harvard scientist Dan Schrag offers a sobering perspective: even if we stopped CO2 emissions immediately, warming would continue for centuries due to ocean thermal inertia. He believes we're "going to be lucky to stop at 4C" of warming-well into unthinkable territory. He argues that solar geoengineering research isn't opening Pandora's box but acknowledging reality: "We don't get to decide" whether it will be used, and scientists must urgently "figure out all the different ways this could go wrong."
Chapter 9
The Control of the Control: Humanity's Uncertain Future
Throughout "Under a White Sky," Kolbert reveals a disturbing pattern: humans intervene in nature, creating problems that require increasingly complex interventions. The Chicago River reversal stands as a prime example - an engineering feat that connected two previously separate watersheds, inadvertently creating a superhighway for invasive species like Asian carp. These aggressive fish now threaten the Great Lakes ecosystem, requiring the installation of sophisticated electric barriers costing millions annually. Similarly, in New Orleans, the extensive levee system that protects the city from flooding has interrupted the Mississippi River's natural sediment distribution, leading to rapid coastal erosion at a rate of a football field every hour. This erosion now necessitates massive sediment diversion projects costing billions of dollars.
The preservation of endangered species increasingly demonstrates this cascade of intervention. The Devil's Hole pupfish of Nevada survives only through constant monitoring and a backup population maintained in an artificial tank system that perfectly replicates their natural habitat. The California condor requires extensive human management, from GPS tracking to lead-poisoning treatment. These species have become, in essence, permanent wards of human conservation.
This escalating cycle of intervention raises profound questions about humanity's relationship with nature. Stewart Brand, the influential environmentalist, boldly declared, "We are as gods and have to get good at it." His organization, Revive & Restore, champions genetic interventions including ambitious de-extinction projects. They're working to resurrect the passenger pigeon using DNA from museum specimens and create blight-resistant American chestnuts by introducing genes from wheat - projects that represent unprecedented levels of ecological engineering.
However, this techno-optimistic approach faces strong opposition. E.O. Wilson, the renowned biologist, warns that "We are not as gods. We're not yet sentient or intelligent enough to be much of anything." Environmental writer Paul Kingsnorth offers an even darker assessment: "We are as gods, but we have failed to get good at it...We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun." These critics point to numerous historical failures of biological intervention.
The cascade of unintended consequences is perhaps best illustrated by Hawaii's ecological disasters. The introduction of African snails led to the import of carnivorous rosy wolf snails to control them. Instead, these predators devastated the islands' native snail species, creating what Wilson termed "an extinction avalanche." Similar stories have played out with mongoose introductions, cane toads in Australia, and kudzu in the American South.
Kolbert leaves us confronting an unprecedented dilemma: in a world irreversibly altered by human activity, simply stepping back won't restore pristine nature. The choice isn't between maintaining an untouched wilderness and human intervention - that ship has sailed. Instead, we must choose between allowing countless species to vanish or embracing increasingly ambitious technological interventions, each carrying its own risks of unintended consequences. As we contemplate engineering solutions as dramatic as solar radiation management - literally whitening our skies to cool the planet - we must grapple with whether our greatest challenge isn't controlling nature, but rather controlling our own impulse to control. The Anthropocene may ultimately test not our ability to dominate nature, but our wisdom in knowing when to stop trying.
