The Guardian
- Jonathan Watts
Robots on coral reefs, vast barriers to hold back the glaciers, simulated
volcanic eruptions to offset global heating ... Can technology repair the mess
we have made? Elizabeth Kolbert is not convinced
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Elizabeth Kolbert’s previous book The Sixth Extinction won a Pulitzer prize. In her new book, Under a White Sky, the environmental writer questions our addiction to tech
solutions. Photograph: M. Scott Brauer
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Elizabeth Kolbert’s favourite movie is the end-of-the-world comedy
Dr
Strangelove
or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. For those who need a quick recap, this cold war film features a
deranged US air force general who orders a nuclear attack on the
Soviet Union using weapons developed by a mad Nazi scientist played by
Peter Sellers. A last-minute glitch almost forestalls an apocalyptic
war, but a gung-ho B-52 pilot has other ideas. He opens the bomb doors
and mounts the H-bomb as if it were a horse, waving his hat and
whooping as he rides the missile towards the world’s oblivion. No
heroism could be more misguided. No movie could end with a blunter
message: how on Earth can we humans trust ourselves with
planet-altering technology?
The same absurdly serious question lies at the heart of Kolbert’s
new book,
Under a White Sky. The Sixth Extinction,
her previous book, won a Pulitzer prize for its investigation into
how mankind has devastated the natural world. Now she has widened
her gaze to whether we can remedy this with ingenious technological
fixes – or make things worse. “There was definitely a question left
hanging: now we have become such a dominant force on planet Earth,
and created so many problems through our intervention, what happens
next?”, she says.
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Absurdly serious … Slim Pickens as the B-52 pilot in
Stanley Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove (1963). Photograph: Collection Christophel/Alamy
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In
Under a White Sky she examines cutting-edge
scientific advances: how much hope can we place in
gene-modification, geoengineering and assisted evolution? To what
extent can we repair the mess we have made? Thanks to humans, the
planet is heating dangerously fast, there is now more carbon dioxide
in the atmosphere than at any time in millions of years, the
extinction rate of other species is hundreds, maybe thousands, of
times above natural levels, and just about every planetary warning
gauge is heading further into the red. Are there mega-solutions out
there for these mega-problems?
One of the most advanced geoengineering plans under discussion is to
simulate a volcano eruption by filling the atmosphere with a million
tonnes of sulphur dioxide each year to reflect the heat of the sun
back into space. Scientists calculate this cooling effect would
offset human-caused global heating, but the benefits would be
temporary and unevenly distributed. To prevent the temperature from
jumping back up, repeated applications would be needed, potentially
causing catastrophes in some parts of the world to save others.
Kolbert says this, at best, might buy a little time, but at worst
could make life impossible for millions. Among the potential side
effects are conflict, acid rain, ozone layer depletion, lower power
generation from solar panels and an alteration of the spectrum of
light so profound that the blue heavens would fade and leave us all
living under a white sky.
Kolbert’s deftly crafted book explores some of the biggest
challenges of our age – it also manages to be wickedly
funny
The last time the world’s air was filled with so many particles
was after Mount Tambora blew in Indonesia in 1815. This led to a
year of endless winter in some parts of the world. In the US, one
writer observed: “The very face of nature seemed to be shrouded in
a deathlike gloom.”
Kolbert’s book is a meticulously researched and deftly crafted work
of journalism that explores some of the biggest challenges of our
age. It also manages to be wickedly funny. Some passages read like
an absurdist novel by
Kurt Vonnegut
or
Joseph Heller. As in
Cat’s Cradle or
Catch-22, humanity is
trapped within an ever more vicious circle created by its own skewed
logic and techno-dependency. As the author writes early on, this is
“a book about people trying to solve problems created by people
trying to solve problems”.
“I hope the book is a bit of a dark comedy,” says Kolbert, who
writes for the New Yorker, over Google Chat from her home in
Massachusetts. “I am trying to turn something of that
Strangelove sensibility on this grave and depressing
problem. I want to make people think but in a way that is not
unrelentingly grim. Whether to laugh or cry has always been a fine
line.”
So far, the Anthropocene is not going so well: humans, she notes,
have transformed half the ice-free land on Earth, dammed or diverted
most of the world’s major rivers and emitted about a hundred times
more carbon dioxide than volcanoes. In terms of biomass, people and
our domesticated animals now outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of 22
to 1. From nuclear bomb test fallout to microplastics, signs of our
presence are everywhere.
Under a White Sky reflects on “our habit of mind -
that when we come up against one of these problems we try to come up
with the technology to solve it. That is a profound thread in recent
human history. How it plays out is perhaps the crucial question in
the coming century.”
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Firefighters look out over a burning hillside as they
fight the Blue Ridge Fire in Yorba Linda, California,
2020. Photograph: Robyn Beck/AFP/Getty Images
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Technology by itself is not intrinsically bad. Much of it, vaccine
technology for example, is brilliant and beneficial – at least to
humans. But invention often originates in short-term or siloed
thinking. And even more frequently, its application fails because of
political and economic decisions taken with little heed for
non-humans and future generations.
Even the great environmentalist
Rachel Carson
cannot escape the irony of history. In one passage, she is
admiringly quoted as observing: “The ‘control of nature’ is a phrase
conceived in arrogance, born of the Neanderthal age of biology and
philosophy, when it was supposed that nature exists for the
convenience of man.” A few pages later, however, we discover that
Carson’s warnings about pesticides and herbicides were used as an
excuse for river managers in Arkansas to cut costs. Instead of
upgrading treatment plants, they imported Asian carp to eat
nitrogen-overloaded algae. This was supposed to be a “natural
solution”. Unfortunately, the carp escaped from the treatment ponds
and devastated the Mississippi river system.
Kolbert tracks the unfolding disaster as the carp problem grew
bigger and bigger and the proposed solutions became more and more
outlandish – physical barriers, electrification, poisoning,
bubble-and-noise deterrents, bounty fishing and an $18bn
hydrological separation scheme drawn up by the United States
Engineering Corps. Military interventions crop up again and again in
the book, underscoring how the old idea of conquering nature has
never really gone away.
Instead of changing ourselves, we adapt the environment. “It was
easier to imagine changing the river… than changing the lives of the
people around it,” Kolbert writes.
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Wildlife officials take part in a roundup of Asian carp
in Smith Bay on Kentucky Lake, 2020. The invasive
species threatens to upend aquatic ecosystems along the
Mississippi River and dozens of tributaries. Photograph: Mark Humphrey/AP
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Our pursuit of convenience is accelerating the destruction of the
natural world. Kolbert’s considers the 19th-century extirpation of
buffaloes, moose, cougar, beaver, wolverines, wild turkey and
eastern elks, which she attributes in part to the inventions of
railways and repeating rifles. Back then, extinctions were still
considered shocking. To commemorate the demise of the passenger
pigeon, Aldo Leopold wrote: “For one species to mourn the passing
of another is a new thing under the sun.” Now, however, it is so
common as to be banal. Scientists estimate that 150 species are
lost every day due to land conversion, road expansion, chemical
use and global heating.
For many species, survival is no longer about being the fittest in
the wild; it’s about fitting in best with mankind. The creatures
that abound are livestock, domestic pets and semi-parasitic
synanthropes such as rats, crows and foxes that live off our waste.
Most other populations are plummeting, though humans have the power
to put certain endangered species on life support.
A jaw-dropping chapter explores the lengths the US goes to protect
the Devils Hole pupfish. This tiny creature lived in a single underground pool in Nevada
that was being sucked dry in the 1970s by nearby farm irrigation.
Numbers declined to just a few dozen, prompting a bumper-sticker
campaign, a congressional debate and a supreme court conservation
order. Since then, the entire Devils Hole pupfish population – which
weighs less than a single Filet-O-Fish – have been transplanted to a
simulacrum, built at a cost of $4.5m and monitored by cameras and a
team of four full-time staff. At one point, the ratio was one
fishkeeper for every 16 fish.
Over the past two centuries, we have decimated the collective value
of species and habitats, and then congratulated ourselves on saving
a small number of survivors in an artificial environment. Pupfish
are among thousands of similarly “conservation reliant” species that
have to be hand-reared, medically assisted, guarded in enclosures or
guided in migration. In another of those absurdist twists,
“protecting” the wild increasingly means encasing it.
Some of the scientists involved tell Kolbert they hope
their research will never be applied
“We get to hear about stories when a population is down to the last
survivors and only then is there a big push. It’s how the human mind
works. We don’t pay attention until a crisis point is reached, and
by then it is extremely difficult,” Kolbert says. She describes
animals on life support as “Stockholm species” – captives that
become accustomed to their prison. The same term might be used to
describe humans, who also come across as trapped in the pursuit of
more domination, which requires the development of ever more
disruptive technology. It’s an escalator we can’t get off. “We are
deep into this,” Kolbert says. “There are no easy answers. There is
no way we can all go back to hunter-gatherer society. That isn’t
happening.” But surely there are alternatives. I tell Kolbert I
liked the book but wish it had delved into other options – politics,
economics, culture, education, nature-based solutions. Humans used
these levers to address problems before the advent of carbon-fuelled
capitalism in the late 18th century.
The United States, though, pays little heed to its pre-industrial
history. The country’s identity is deeply enmeshed with technology,
which is treated as the great enabler of progress and freedom. It
has also long been used as an excuse for climate inaction. In the
late 1980s, the first President George Bush backed away from fossil
fuel controls partly on the grounds that the climate problem would
likely be solved by future inventions. That has become a mantra for
Republicans ever since. Under the Trump presidency, US climate
diplomats focused on largely unproven carbon capture technology in
the future rather than emissions cuts now.
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Philanthropist Bill Gates takes the stage before
addressing the 2019 Climate Action Summit in the United
Nations General Assembly. Photograph: Jason DeCrow/AP
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Under a White Sky is one of three high-profile
books recently published on the climate crisis. Another is by Bill
Gates, who proposes an unapologetically US-technocapitalist approach
in his book
How to Prevent a Climate Disaster. It reads like a cross between a planetary instruction manual and
a “Global Warming for Dummies” guide. The Microsoft co-founder
suggests what might be described as a global systems upgrade to fix
the bugs in the planet and reveals that he is investing in most of
the proposed technological solutions, including direct air capture,
meat substitutes and fertiliser alternatives. He makes a very strong
business case for change. But there is little evidence Gates is
willing to think outside the techno-economy he helped to create. It
could be argued he is simply being pragmatic. After all, upgrades
are easier than reinventing a system from scratch. They are
certainly more politically palatable to those in power. But what if
the system itself is the problem?
When I challenge Kolbert on her techno-fatalism, she agrees that she
looks on these technologies “with a jaundiced eye and a degree of
horror. But I do see it as the overriding pattern. I don’t see us
moving in another direction.” Though it “is definitely a step
forward when someone as eminent as Bill Gates is assessing what
technologies we need.”
Her book concludes with the ultimate example of fiddling with the
planetary controls: the kind of geoengineering that might produce a
white sky. This section could almost be printed in red with a
warning sign, “Do not open, except in the event of a catastrophe -
and even then think twice.” Solar radiation management, ocean
seeding and other efforts to fix the world’s thermostat are no mere
tweaks, no simple re-wiring jobs. Some of the scientists involved
tell Kolbert they hope their research will never be applied. One
says he is studying this topic now simply to avoid ill-informed
decision making later. She also quotes a revealing exchange between
two scientists at Harvard University. “Geo-engineering is not
something to do lightly. The reason we are thinking about it is
because the real world has dealt us a shitty hand,” one advocate
says. “We dealt it ourselves,” the other replies.
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Plastic bottles and other garbage floats in the
Potpecko lake near Priboj, in southwest Serbia, January
2021. Photograph: Darko Vojinović/AP
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When I ask Kolbert if she thinks we will see manipulated white skies
in her lifetime, she says it depends first on the still uncertain
speed of climate change, and then on who is making the decisions.
“If we are on the luckier side and things happen more slowly or
warming is on the lower end of estimates, then maybe we will avoid
that conversation. But I don’t know if it will be a conversation. It
could be small group of powerful nations making decisions for
everyone. So will we see a white sky in my lifetime? I don’t think
so. But in my kids’ lifetime? That is not impossible.”
She is clearly uncomfortable about the direction of travel. The
technology can’t take us back to an undisturbed world. Instead, we
are are heading towards a future in which humanity will be
constantly reinventing our planet. Her book considers plans to use
robots to manage coral reefs and the building of concrete barriers
to hold greenland glaciers in place, but such efforts to buy time
cannot last indefinitely. As one pithy Danish interlocutor puts it:
“Pissing in your pants will only keep you warm for so long.” Soon
humanity will need another fix that will likely create another
problem.
“We are as gods and we might as well get good at it,” Stewart Brand,
editor of the Whole Earth Catalog, wrote in its first edition in
1968. This view was later dismissed by the eminent biologist EO
Wilson, who stated: “We are not as gods. We are neither intelligent
or sentient enough to be much of anything.” More recently, the
British writer
Paul Kingsnorth
took a different tack again. “We are as gods but we have failed to
get good at it ... We are Loki, killing the beautiful for fun. We
are Saturn devouring our children.”
I ask Kolbert which of these three views are closest to her own.
“That is the question at the heart of the book,” she responds. “Are
we gods or are we just bumbling, technologically advanced creatures?
As Ed Wilson also said: ‘We have paleolithic brains, we have
medieval institutions and space-age technologies.’ That is a really
dangerous combination and we are seeing that.”
Such philosophical considerations lift this book out of the
ordinary. I wish Kolbert had gone further still. We have forgotten
or ignored that our planet is already a technological marvel – the
only life-support system that we know of in the universe.
Strengthening that natural system is surely the goal our smartest
brains should be focused on. After all, it has been done before.
Archeologists have discovered evidence that much of the Amazon
rainforest is anthropogenic – fruit trees and medicinal plants
cultivated by the indigenous communities who have lived there for
millennia. Such nondisruptive technology might also be called
wisdom.
The third of the three big new environment books,
The New Climate War by
Michael Mann, goes furthest in this regard, with a strategic, wide-ranging
overview of humanity’s present predicament and an exploration of
possible pathways out of it. He champions overall system change to
decarbonise our civilisation. This involves ethics, politics,
finance, communication, psychology, behaviour and belief.
Technology, in the forms of wind, solar and other renewables is an
important part of the picture, but Mann – a veteran climate
scientist – warns against over-reliance on unproven fixes such as
geoengineering, that distract from simpler, cheaper, safer
alternatives.
“Geoengineering appeals to free-market conservatives, as it plays to
the notion that market-driven technological innovation can solve any
problems without governmental intervention or regulation,” he
writes. “A price on carbon, or incentives for renewable energy? Too
difficult and risky. Engaging in a massive, uncontrolled experiment
in a desperate effort to somehow offset the effects of global
warming? Perfect!”.
While Kolbert takes a journalistic position of wry detachment, Mann
is a sociopolitical activist. I ask Kolbert if she has ever
considered following the example of Bill McKibben, a former New York
Times writer who has become a leading climate campaigner.
“Absolutely, I also thought about it. What is most useful thing for
me to be doing?” she says. “McKibben has had an incredible impact.
He is very good at it, very inspiring. But I don’t think that is
where my own strengths lie.”
I ask her how her optimism-pessimism dial has shifted since the
election of Joe Biden. “It has moved from: ‘We are doing the
stupidest possible things given the situation’, which is where my
needle was for the past four years. Now in the US at least, we have
smart and committed people thinking about these questions. We have
an interior secretary that for the first time in history is a native
American. I think she will have very different priorities from many
of her predecessors. But how much influence can one presidency have
on the great forces of history?”
Has writing the book made Kolbert more or less enthusiastic about
human interference? “My adventures with some of these scientists who
work on really cutting-edge projects with gene editing, with carbon
dioxide removal, with geo-engineering, did force me to confront some
of my own deep seated and unexamined mental habits,” she answers.
“The question of how to feel about that - whether we are entering a
brave new world that is exciting or a brave new world that is
horrifying, I hope to leave that up to you.”
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
by Elizabeth Kolbert is published by Bodley Head. The author
will discuss her book at a Guardian Live online event on
Wednesday 24 March. Book tickets
here.
Links
