Under a White Sky

Chapter 1

Rivers make good metaphors too good, perhaps. They can be murky and charged with hidden meaning, like the Mississippi, which to Twain represented the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter. Alternatively, they can be bright and clear and mirror-like. Thoreau set off for a week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and within a day found himself lost in reflection over the reflections he saw playing on the water. Rivers can signify destiny, or coming into knowledge, or coming upon that which one would rather not know. Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth, Conrad s Marlow recalls. They can stand for time, for change, and for life itself. You can t step into the same river twice, Heraclitus is supposed to have said, to which one of his followers, Cratylus, is supposed to have replied, You can t step into the same river even once.

It is a bright morning following several days of rain, and the not-quite-river I am riding is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The canal is a hundred and sixty feet wide and runs as straight as a ruler. Its waters, the shade of old cardboard, are flecked with candy wrappers and bits of Styrofoam. On this particular morning, traffic consists of barges hauling sand, gravel, and petrochemicals. The one exception is the vessel I m on, a pleasure craft named City Living.

City Living is outfitted with off-white banquettes and a canvas awning that snaps smartly in the breeze. Also on board are the boat s captain and owner and several members of a group called Friends of the Chicago River. The Friends are not a fastidious bunch. Often their outings involve wading knee-deep in polluted water to test for fecal coliform. Still, our expedition is slated to take us farther down the canal than any of them has ever been before. Everyone is excited and, if truth be told, also a little creeped out.

We have made our way into the canal

Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. For her work at The New Yorker, where she s a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

Riveting . . . Under a White Sky expertly mixes travelogue, science reporting and explanatory journalism. The Washington Post

To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth, you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert. . . . It s a tribute to Kolbert s skills as a storyteller that she transforms the quest to deal with the climate crisis into a darkly comic tale of human hubris and imagination that could either end in flames or in a new vision of Paradise. Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone

A superb and honest reflection of our extraordinary time. Nature

[Under a White Sky] exhibits Kolbert s sculptor-like skill for making climate change feel tangible, happening before our eyes and beneath our fingers. Wired

What makes Under A White Sky so valuable and such a compelling read is Kolbert tells by showing. Without beating the reader over the head, she makes it clear how far we already are from a world of undisturbed, perfectly balanced nature and how far we must still go to find a new balance for the planet s future that still has us humans in it. NPR
 
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 Nation

Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert s beat is examining the impact of humans on the environment and she does it better than basically everyone. Lit Hub
 
An eye-opening and at times terrifying examination of just how far scientists have already gone in their attempts to re-engineer the planet. Gizmodo

If you like your apocalit with a side of humor, she will have you laughing while Rome burns. MIT Technology Review

Brilliantly executed and urgently necessary. Publishers Weekly (starred review)

A master elucidator, Kolbert is gratifyingly direct as she assesses our predicament between a rock and a hard