So Chicago decided, Well, we really have to do something about it, and what they did was this incredible engineering project, and now it flows basically to the southwest and eventually into the Mississippi, and all of Chicago’s waste flows in the same direction. All of Chicago’s human and animal waste flowed into Lake Michigan and there were constant outbreaks of typhoid and cholera. The Chicago River used to flow east into Lake Michigan, which also happened to be Chicago’s only source of drinking water. I start with the example of the Chicago River, which was reversed in an extraordinary engineering project at the beginning of the 20th century.
Naomi Elias: You describe Under A White Sky as “a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Can you explain that a little?Įlizabeth Kolbert: The pattern that I’m looking at in the book is ways in which humans have intervened-or, if you prefer, mucked around with-the natural world and then have decided that the consequences are bad and are now looking for new forms of intervention to try to solve those problems. We talked about what it’s like to write a book about a big question you don’t yet have the answer to, and what it will take to undo the environmental damage incurred during the Trump years. I spoke to Kolbert over the phone the day after President Joe Biden’s inauguration. “The issue, at this point,” Kolbert writes, “is not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end?”
From the Mojave to lava fields in Iceland, Kolbert takes readers on a globe-spanning journey to explore these projects while weighing their pros, cons, and ethical implications (the book’s title refers to the way the sky could be bleached of color as a potential side effect of solar geoengineering, one of the proposed interventions to combat global warming). The book chronicles the casualties of short-sighted human meddling with the planet and its resources and the present-day efforts being made to address that meddling-or, as Kolbert puts it, efforts to “control the control of nature.” Interviews with scientists in a wide array of disciplines-climate scientists, climate entrepreneurs, biologists, glaciologists, and geneticists-reveal a trend of projects aiming to transform nature in order to save it. In Under a White Sky, Kolbert ponders the nature of the future by examining a new pattern she attributes to “the recursive logic of the Anthropocene”: human interventions attempting to answer for past human interventions in the environment.
0 kommentar(er)
