File:Under a White Sky.jpg

Under a White Sky

by Elizabeth Kolbert

• https://www.npr.org/2021/02/08/965306203/under-a-white-sky-examines-what-it-might-take-for-humans-to-continue-to-exist

Kolbert is well-known as the best-selling author of The Sixth Extinction. Her reporting brought the ongoing mass-extinction event that we're inadvertently causing now from talk in scientific literature to common knowledge. In this new book, Kolbert once again looks down the barrel of the Anthropocene, the new geologic epoch where human activity represents the most powerful force shaping the machinery of Earth's planetary evolution. Early in the book, Kolbert lists the startling facts of this new Anthropocene Earth:

"People have, by now, di­rectly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth — some twenty-seven million square miles — and indirectly half of what remains. We have dammed or diverted most of the world's major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more ni­trogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more car­bon dioxide than volcanoes do. ...hu­mans and livestock outweigh all vertebrates combined, with the exception of fish. In the age of man, there is nowhere to go, and this includes the deepest trenches of the oceans and the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet, that does not already bear our Friday-like footprints."

The consequence of the extraordinary power we're exerting on the Earth is that the planet is changing. It's sliding out of the state we found it in 10,000 years ago when the last ice age ended. But this new planet seems like it's going to be a lot less hospitable to our "project of civilization" than the one we've started with. In response to this sobering fact, communities across the world are trying to shift from inadvertent impacts on the natural world to conscious and intentional control. Kolbert's book is, essentially, reporting from the front lines of these frenzied efforts.

~