Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

In Kolbert’s own words, this book is about “people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems”. We know that climate change is a problem. We know that land loss, sea level rise, plant and animal extinction, and a rapidly warming planet are major problems. So what do humans do about it? There are certainly the “obvious” (sort of?) solutions: we need to lower CO2 levels, plant more trees, use less water, buy electric cars, install solar panels, eat less meat, purchase less “stuff”, eat local and organic, etc. But these are all just minor stopgaps to major changes that have already taken place, like the city of New Orleans sinking further and further into the sea, and the “bleaching” of the coral reefs in Australia, which is leading to an ongoing, catastrophic loss of known and unknown species. Kolbert writes about scientists, activists, and government-related officials who are actively acknowledging that a future is coming where the future is no longer natural, i.e., we humans have already tried to manipulate nature to the point of what one writer describes as “Atchafalaya”: any struggle against natural forces, when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth. Whether it is manipulating DNA with the use of CRISPR technologies, solar geo-engineering, reforestation, or raising artificial levees atop natural ones in Louisiana, we humans are doing our best to protect ourselves and see to it that we can endure what is happening and what is coming our way, but how much push/pull can there be between us and nature when it has been proven time and time again that nature always wins? This is not a totally depressing book because there really, truly are good people that are working to try and solve these vexing problems, but most of the time it feels like all we are doing is either maintaining the status quo — or just making things worse. A tough but necessary read, Under a White Sky reminds us that time is indeed in short supply to make some large scale changes — although it may already be too late for the millions of species driven to extinction by humans taking over, well, everything. Hard to remain hopeful, but what other choice do we have?

• today people outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of more than eight to one
• Plaquemines Parish — southeastern tip of Louisiana
• distinction of being among the fastest disappearing places on earth
• since the 1930’s, LA has shrunk by more than 2K square miles
• every hour and a half, LA sheds another football field worth of land
• evidence of a man made natural disaster, the sunken fields
• straightened, regularized, harnessed, shackled by humans
• vast system is the very reason the region is disintegrating, coming apart like an old shoe
• because the Mississippi is always dropping sediment, it’s always on the move
• New Orleans in 1718, during floods, sand and other heavy particles tend to settle out of the water first, creating what are known as natural levees
• levee in French means “raised”
• they raised artificial levees atop the natural ones
• early levees failed frequently, but established a pattern that endures to this day
• Einstein: “We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them.”
• to match the pace of land loss, the state would have to churn out a new BA-39 every nine days — tilling the land, basically
• when the Mississippi bursts through its levees, be they natural or man made, the opening is called a “crevasse”
• when they open the gates to the city, simulating flooding, sediment rich water would rush across Plaquemines into Barataria Bay
• after a few years, enough sand and silt would be deposited that terra semi firma would start to form
• in contrast to projects like BA-39, it would continue to deliver sediment year after year
• New Orleans is referred to by residents as the “bowl”, most of it lies below or at sea level
• some parts of NO dropping by almost half a foot a decade
• pumping water out of the ground exacerbates the very problem that needs to be solved
• the more water that’s pumped, the faster the city sinks
• the more it sinks, the more pumping is required
• proposals to allow parts of the city to revert to water were floated and then rejected, politically
• the city will look more like an island in the coming years
• Atchafalaya — any struggle against natural forces, when human beings conscript themselves to fight against the earth
• Louisiana delta is now often referred to by hydrologists as a coupled human and natural system
• in terms of mammal/creature loss, the difference once we hit the 19th century was the sheer pace of violence
• advent of technologies like the railroad and the repeating rifle turned extinction into a readily observable phenomenon
• possible to watch creatures vanish in real time
• extinction rates are now hundreds, perhaps thousands of times higher than the so called background rates that applied over most of geological time
• whole ecosystems are threatened, and the losses have started to feed on themselves
• one way to make sense of the biodiversity crisis would simply be to accept it
• the impact that brought an end to the Cretaceous wiped out something like 75% of all species on earth — eventually new species evolved to take their place
• now, there are creatures we’ve pushed to the edge and then yanked back — “conservation-reliant”
• “Stockholm Species” — utter dependence on their persecutors
• over the course of the 1980’s, something like half of the Caribbean’s coral cover disappeared
• in 1998, a so called global bleaching event, caused by a spike in water temperatures, killed more than 15% of corals worldwide
• futurist — acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural
• to Darwin, Nuns and fantails and tumblers and Barbs provided crucial, albeit indirect, support for transmutation
• by choosing which birds could reproduce, pigeon breeders had developed lineages that barely resembled one another
• nature’s power of selection
• great barrier reef isn’t a reef so much as a collection of reefs — some 3K in all — that stretches over 135K square miles, an area larger than Italy
• number of species that can be found in a healthy patch of reef is probably greater than can be encountered in a similar amount of space anywhere on earth
• nitrogen and phosphorus are in short supply
• how reefs support so much diversity under such austere conditions is Darwin’s paradox
• one theory is that they have developed the ultimate recycling system: one creature’s trash becomes its neighbors treasure
• estimated that one out of every four creatures in the oceans spends at least part of its life on a reef
• natural selection — indifferent, but infinitely patient — that had given rise to life’s astonishing diversity
• CRISPR is shorthand for a suite of techniques that make it vastly easier for researchers and biohackers to manipulate DNA
• CRISPR allows its users to snip a stretch of DNA and then either disable the affected sequence or replace it with a new one
• a way to rewrite the very molecules of life any way we wish
• using our understanding of biological processes to see if we can benefit a system that is in trauma
• cane toads are a menace in Australia because just about everything eats them — they are poisonous
• with CRISPR, guide RNA is used to target the stretch of DNA to be cut
• when the cell attempts to repair the damage, often mistakes are introduced and the gene is disabled
• if a “repair template” is supplied, a new genetic sequence can be introduced
• there are genes that play by the rules and there are also renegades that refuse to
• outlaw genes fix the game in their favor
• such rule breaking genes are said to “drive”
• CRISPR associated, or CAS, enzymes, which work like tiny knives
• insert the CRISPR Cas genes into an organism, and the organism can be programmed to perform the task of genetic reprogramming on itself
• with a synthetic gene drive, the normal rules of heredity are overridden and an altered gene spreads quickly
• in a world of synthetic gene drives, not only do people determine the conditions under which evolution is taking place, we can determine the outcome
• strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what’s the alternative?
• rejecting such tech as unnatural isn’t going to bring nature back
• the choice is not between what was and what is, but between what is and what will be, which, often enough, is nothing
• the issue is not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end?
• reasoning behind “genetic rescue” is the sort responsible for many a world altering screwup
• Kingsnorth: “Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something. Sometimes it is the other way around.”
• instead of allowing carbon dioxide to escape into air, the Hellisheioi plant in Iceland would capture the gas and dissolve it in water
• suggested that deep beneath the surface, CO2 would react with the volcanic rock and mineralize
• even without any help, most of the CO2 humans have emitted would eventually turn to stone, via a natural process known as chemical weathering
• “eventually” means thousands of years
• James Watt invented the steam engine, kickstarted the industrial revolution
• as water power gave way to steam power, CO2 emissions began to rise, at first slowly, then vertiginously
• one out of every three molecules of CO2 loose in the air today was put there by people
• the threshold of catastrophe and then suck enough carbon out of the air to keep calamity at bay, a situations that’s become known as “overshoot”
• to the extent that emissions are seen as bad, emitters become guilty
• such a moral stance makes virtually everyone a sinner and makes hypocrites out of many who are concerned about climate change but still partake in the benefits of modernity
• CO2 emissions are cumulative, like a bathtub
• cutting emissions is at once absolutely essential and insufficient
• with just 4% of the world’s population, the U.S. is responsible for almost 30% of aggregate emissions
• negative emissions — as an idea — is irresistible
• once captured, CO2 within two years, it’s stone, 1KM underground
• enhanced weathering — bring the rock up to the surface to meet the CO2
• in the Carboniferous period, vast quantities of plant material got flooded and buried
• result was coal, which, had it been left in the ground, would have held on to its carbon more of less forever
• reforestation, combined with underground injection = bioenergy with carbon capture and storage
• plant trees — trees are burned to produce electricity and resulting CO2 is captured from the smokestack and shoved underground — have your cake and eat it too type deal
• geoengineering — “solar radiation management” — if volcanoes can cool the world, people can too
• first government report on global warming was 1965, LBJ
• talked about “reflective particles”
• 1970’s, climate engineering fell out of favor
• David Keith, professor of applied physics at Harvard
• best way forward, he says, is to do everything: cut emissions, work on carbon removal, and look a lot more seriously at geoengineering
• opening up a range of options could inspire greater action
• solar engineering would not just be cheap, relatively speaking, but speedy as well
• not a solution though; addresses symptoms, not the cause
• Project Iceworm — cold plan to win cold war in Greenland, tunnels in the ice sheet
• nuclear missiles would be shuttled along the tracks to keep Soviets guessing
• calm of the last 10K years is coming to an end — humanity has used the stability it lucked into — by studying the tunnels in Greenland, they found a ton of research on the climate changing
• now Greenland scale instability
• summer of 2019, Greenland shed almost 600B tons of ice, producing enough water to fill a pool the size of CA to a depth of 4 feet
• enough ice on Greenland to raise global sea levels by 20 FT
• this book is about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems
• enthusiasm tempered by doubt
• best that anyone could come up with, given the circumstances
• scientists can only make recommendations; implementation is a political decision