Under a White Sky

A book review

Jul 25, 2022

They were careless people, Tom and Daisy—they smashed up things and creatures and then retreated back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it was that kept them together, and let other people clean up the mess they had made. ~F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

Elizabeth Kolbert

Crown/Random House 2021

242 pages

When I first read Fitzgerald’s Jazz Age classic, The Great Gatsby, in high school, the description above, of Tom Buchanan and his wife Daisy’s destructiveness and carelessness, really stood out for me. It was one of those rare moments when a teenager actually understood something from his literature assignment. It seemed that Fitzgerald was depicting people I knew. I thought of at least a dozen individuals who could fit the description of Tom and Daisy, every word of it.

Nothing could go wrong for the couple. Born into wealth, Tom would also die wealthy. For him and Daisy the world was their oyster. And Fitzgerald points out that the world was also their dumping ground, their waste site, a place to pile up their discards once they used them up or tired of them, a place for all the broken things their carelessness destroyed.

Considering humanity’s record on the environment, there are a lot of Toms and Daisies around, creating oil spills, clear cutting old growth forests, making urban sprawl in former farmlands and forests, and lying about the science of global heating.

If there are any Toms or Daisies in Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky: the Nature of the Future, they are mentioned only in passing. Kolbert concentrates on the folks who clean up the mess that humans have made of their environment. Each chapter is a travelogue in which she visits with the people and organizations remedying or fending off some environmental disaster. She visits the the people who power up and monitor the underwater electric fence that is designed to keep invasive Asian carp from migrating from the Mississippi drainage basin into the Great Lakes. One chapter is devoted to the folks who are trying to adapt the coral of the Great Barrier Reef to the conditions brought about by climate change.

She spends time at Harvard University’s Solar Engineering Program, brought about by the investment of Bill Gates. Solar engineering or geoengineering are techniques being investigated that would counteract against the warming caused by our emissions of greenhouse gases. One of the strategies under investigation by the Harvard group is spewing tons and tons of sulphur into the stratosphere. Interacting with the chemistry of the upper atmosphere, the sulphur would convert to sulphuric acid, a substance that reflects sunlight and would thus cool the Earth and mitigate the effects of global heating.

This cooling has been known about for a long time. It occurs when there are large volcanic eruptions, which throw lots of sulphur into the stratosphere. Kolbert details the 1815 eruption of Mount Tambora in Indonesia, which cooled the entire planet and resulted in summertime frosts and weather so cold that crops failed in Europe. The white sky of the book’s title alludes to the foggy haze that would dominate the sky all over the world after a few years of humans cooling their planet by creating an artificial Mount Tambora year after year.

This gets us to the central theme of Under a White Sky. Not only have we messed up so much of the Earth by clearcutting, overfishing, introducing invasive species, using DDT, and doing dozens of other messed up things, but once we mess them up, there are incredibly few times that we might be able to set things back the way they were. In Chicago, faced with a thoroughly altered hydrology that has a river flowing backwards and the introduction of destructive invasive species, we are left to come up with fixes like underwater electric fences. Although scientists have for generations understood the causes of climate change and politicians were cognizant of the problem over 50 years ago—LBJ gave a speech in which he mentioned global heating, and the Nixon administration considered action on climate change—nothing has been done to reduce emissions. So instead of solving the problem, we wind up with a clever fix, and live under white skies.

If you’re going to read a book about environmental issues, it should be one written by Elizabeth Kolbert. This is her third book on the environment, after The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes From a Catastrophe. I sensed that the New Yorker staff writer (Many of the chapters in Under a White Sky first appeared in the New Yorker.) cares about the rivers, corals, and blue skies that she writes about, yet her writing remains clear-eyed from chapter to chapter. She does not condemn, nor does she moralize. And she lets us know that she will NOT sugarcoat anything in her writing. Her narrative is often lightened by details of her interactions with the people she meets during her investigations, such as the debate over whether one scientist has a pot belly or merely has a paunch. Even still, her message is straightforward: we’ve messed things up pretty bad, and even our fixes mess things up more.

We may yearn for free-flowing rivers and large stretches of unspoiled nature. But nature is changing, and nature is changing because of us. If any of us think that we have any chance of preserving nature unspoiled, Elizabeth Kolbert will tell you that your notions are as vain as those of Jay Gatsby trying to return to a time of his first love with Daisy.

The Green Dispatch

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