Elizabeth Kolbert ‘s new book on scientific responses to environmental crises is even more frightening than her last, how difficult it is to feel. But The New Yorker 2014 award-winning Pulitzer Writer Award, Sixth Extinction: A Supernatural History, documenting the eradication of wholesale species due to human hardship, Under a bright sky crippled shows how heavy we are on trust which is also not dangerous.
It is, as she puts it, “a book about the world going out of control” amid determined efforts by scientists to minimize the damage. These efforts include electronic waterways to prevent the spread of aggressive fish and splicing genes to living things to program them for self-destruction. (“What could possibly go wrong?” Kolbert ponders carefully.)
At the moment, people all over the world are holding major interventions to save endangered species. Research teams are engaged in “assisted evolution” to produce corals that will withstand the acidity of the ocean. Some scientists are working on ways to extract carbon from the air and take it in underground. Others are looking at blasting particles into the atmosphere to block the sun from reducing rising global temperatures due to other coal we have already put in.
All of these approaches are risky and none are elegant. They do not represent as much progress as urgent efforts to deal with. They are not, as Kolbert puts it, “improvements on the natives.”
But still, genetic engineering may be the only way to bring species back from the brink – if not the truth – extinction. Almost all positive conditions for the future created by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change call for negative emissions – that is, the removal of carbon dioxide that is already in the atmosphere. The problems created by technology need technological solutions, at least in part, if they are to be solved at all.
“We are gods and may we get good at it,” Stuart Brand wrote in the first Whole Land Catalog in 1968. Others agree. “We are not gods,” replied biologist EO Wilson. British writer Paul Kingsnorth built it: “We are gods, but we have not been able to get well, and now we have run out of time.”
This is the central puzzle that plays out in the pages of Under a bright sky. Kolbert, an excellent writer, travels the globe to look at progressive efforts to soften the messages we have made. There is no introduction to mapping the concept of the book, there is nothing to relieve the future in quixotic efforts balanced on the awful edge of the future.
Rachel Carson wrote Silent spring under the job title, Nature Control, which her book describes as “a phrase symbolized in anguish. ”(This title was later used by John McPhee for his collection of stories of great efforts to harness technology in fights against rivers, erupting volcanoes, and breaking down mountains.)
In fact, if you resist global warming by fading from the sun, you have to do it year after year at increasing rates, disturbing water patterns, growing worse, and, researchers say, turning the skies from blue to white – hence the title of Kolbert ‘s book.
Attempts to subdue the natural world into an intrusion, if not a failure to fail, at least are wildly unlike working without a lump. It is much easier to damage the environment than to repair it.
But the coolest thing about Kolbert ‘s new book is that it shows how time – consuming, invisible, dangerous and costly it can be to maintain biological diversity, survive climate change, and tackle other problems. caused previous attempts to resolve problems. The coldest thing is that we have been left with no other choice – but, perhaps, for all of humanity to take action to radically change our behavior toward common goals.
And everyone knows that there is not much opportunity for that.