Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert won the Pulitzer Prize for her 2014 bestselling book, The Sixth Extinction, and her 2006 book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, has also been recommended on Five Books, so it’s no surprise that Under a White Sky has been anticipated environment/climate change books of the year. It’s a look at what scientists are doing to save the planet, which can be very scary at times.

Recommendations from our site

“In this book she’s looking at case studies of what she calls ‘the control of the control of nature’. It’s this weird recursion that she says is a characteristic of the Anthropocene, where our attempts to control nature have given rise to second order problems and unintended consequences. However, it’s too late to do nothing. Now, in order to save elements of nature, we must try to control the effects of previous attempts to control them” Read more...

The Best Climate Books of 2021

Sarah Dry, Science Writer

“Under a White Sky is all about our attempt to control nature and then repair the impact of what we’ve done. It’s a book about solving the problems created by the people trying to solve the problems, as somebody rather neatly put it. It is really fascinating. It’s the law of unintended consequences: ‘We’ve got a problem with this. So we’ll dam it and we’ll reroute the river this way.’ And then, ‘Oh, hang on, all these rare fish are dying because we’ve stolen their water.’ And then we create a completely false place for them to live to survive.” Read more...

The Best Conservation Books of 2021

Charlotte Smith