Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

"Elizabeth Kolbert is good at the telling detail. In this book she’s looking at case studies of what she calls ‘the control of the control of nature’. It’s this weird recursion that she says is a characteristic of the Anthropocene , where our attempts to control nature have given rise to second order problems and unintended consequences. However, it’s too late to do nothing. Now, in order to save elements of nature, we must try to control the effects of previous attempts to control them. The book starts with a case study of the Chicago River, which was reversed in the early part of the 20th century as part of a massive hydro engineering project with repercussions for a large portion of the hydrology of the United States. This had significant ecological consequences that were not foreseen, leading to the introduction of a species of Asian carp to try and deal with aquatic weeds, which in turn led to more unintended consequences. Ironically, the Asian carp were introduced in 1963, which was the year after the publication of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring , in which she made the case against chemical pesticides and biocides and in favor of biological controls, of which the Asian carp was a prime example. So here was an example where a seemingly natural solution was implemented, which had just as many unintended consequences as these chemical solutions. What I think Kolbert wants us to consider is that the linkages between ecological and human systems are so complex that it’s very hard to know what the effects of our interventions will be. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter She uses a lot of examples to show how extremely well-meaning and concerned scientists end up trying to understand, tinker with and manage natural systems using ever more technology and interventions, to save something that we might still think of as natural. One of the most poignant examples she uses is this species of fish that are found in tiny pools in Death Valley National Park. Some of these pools are the size of a swimming pool and they contain these tiny little fish called pupfish. And because these pupfish have been isolated, one pool may contain the only population of a certain species of this fish. As a result of climate change, some of these pools are drying up. There’s this example where a biologist is carrying the total population of one of these pupfish in two buckets, trying to transport it to another pool. Then they create artificial pools, and these scientists are trying to breed the pupfish. But the pupfish only release a single egg at a time, so they’re trying to track these microscopic eggs and coax tiny populations of tiny pupfish to reproduce. Kolbert is the kind of writer who wants to present us with an image and encourage us to consider the meaning of that image for ourselves. She doesn’t tell us precisely how to make sense of this, but she presents it with a wry, slightly detached air. It has a somewhat bloodless feeling to it, and a valid criticism of the book that can be made is that she doesn’t engage with the economic and political causes of a lot of these interventions, and the way that they impact different people in different landscapes differently. But, at the same time, she has a very good eye for the telling case study and the telling detail, revealing the tragic absurdity of the circumstances that we find ourselves in, which is only going to increase. I didn’t feel that when I was reading it. I think that’s because the people who are involved in doing this are so thoughtful and dedicated and passionate and self-aware of the issues, of this paradox of trying to restore nature through technological interventions, that it provokes a sense of respect, both for the professional expertise and care of the people involved and for the complexity of nature. And, I guess, to say that nature is complex and that our interventions have unintended consequences is only the first step. For me, it doesn’t necessarily need to be seen as inducing paralysis if it makes us humbler and more thoughtful. It doesn’t mean not acting, it means acting on the basis of the best information, the most thoughtful deliberation, the best communication about the potential consequences that we can. And remember that doing nothing is also a kind of intervention. They basically take over and eat almost all the native species of fish. They’re also dangerous to human beings because they jump out of the water, and people riding in motorboats collide with them at speed and can be seriously injured. Part of the intervention in that case was trying to get people to eat the carp, on the assumption that the only more voracious eater than an Asian carp is a human being. The problem is that the carp are notoriously hard to prepare, they turn into kind of mush when you try and debone them. Lots of money is now being invested in trying to create tasty Asian carp patties. There’s lots of examples of this happening, like the cane toads in Australia that were introduced in the 1930s to control beetles that were damaging crops and then basically ate everything. They’re also poisonous, so a lot of endemic species ate the cane toads and were poisoned by them."

"Under a White Sky is all about our attempt to control nature and then repair the impact of what we’ve done. It’s a book about solving the problems created by the people trying to solve the problems, as somebody rather neatly put it. It is really fascinating. It’s the law of unintended consequences: ‘We’ve got a problem with this. So we’ll dam it and we’ll reroute the river this way.’ And then, ‘Oh, hang on, all these rare fish are dying because we’ve stolen their water.’ And then we create a completely false place for them to live to survive. There’s a really nice bit, when she’s in Death Valley in the United States. She is staying in Las Vegas that night, at the hotel with the Eiffel Tower outside, Paris Las Vegas. And she says, ‘I’m in my fake French room, and I’m looking at the fake Eiffel Tower. I could go down to the fake French bar. Maybe this is how those fish feel. They’re in this completely fake environment, to try and keep them alive because we were doing something else and mucked up their actual habitat.’ There is, with a British academic who was working in the States, in Hawaii. I noticed in the acknowledgements that she died. She discovered that for some reason—they don’t really know why—some types of coral are surviving. In a rather pragmatic way, they’re trying to breed that type of coral because they’re not convinced that we’ll get our act together. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s a really interesting look—as all these books are—at what we’ve done when we weren’t trying to do it. Like Fathoms : nobody set out to rid the world of whales, and all the things that depend on whales being there. Nobody set out to upset a very complicated fungal system that we didn’t know was there. But our efforts have an impact and that’s what these books are about. It’s probably more downbeat, I would say. All of the books do have hope, but with a lot of them you feel the author’s frustration. All of them are, in their different ways, experts on what they’re talking about. You feel the complexity of the solution because the problem is so complex now that the solutions are complex. As Dieter Helm would point out, we’ve done a lot of talking and not a lot of doing. I’m not an environmental journalist, but I do do countryside journalism and the depth of my ignorance shocks me. I didn’t know anything about fungi or whales, I didn’t know about Islands of Abandonment . I knew a bit more about Net Zero because I’ve interviewed Dieter Helm. But there is that moment when you just think, ‘Wow, everyone should know this.’ I was reading the whales book, Fathoms , on holiday. And I kept saying, ‘Oh, did you know?’ and reading it out loud. All these books are a little bit like that, there are bits when you will find yourself quoting them in a slightly irritating way to your friends and family because all the stuff in them is so interesting. We’ve got the meeting tomorrow when we’ve got to pick the winner and I have no idea which one will win. I’d really like everyone to read the shortlist and not just the winner. Whichever book wins, there will be others which could have/should have. They are all weirdly hopeful and well worth reading. The winner of The Wainwright Prize, sponsored by James Cropper , was announced on Tuesday September 7th. Part of our best books of 2021 series."