Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

Elizabeth Kolbert, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and a staff writer at The New Yorker, has written extensively on environmental subjects and climate change. Her other books include The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Field Notes from a Catastrophe. As a journalist, she’s also won two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the book, she draws on her extensive experience reporting on humanity’s capacity for planetary destruction and modification. Kolbert includes herself in the narrative, describing her awe-filled reactions to the natural world and her skepticism toward the interventions meant to mimic or preserve it.

Throughout the book, Kolbert often writes in the first-person, using humor and incisive observation to bring human management of nature to life. The first-person also establishes her credibility in the subject matter, and deepens the reader’s understanding of the stakes. When describing a week at a research station on the Great Barrier Reef, Kolbert draws on her long experience writing about the natural world to invite the reader to wonder at that world—in this case, the prodigious biodiversity of coral reefs, where she saw “sharks, dolphins, manta rays, sea turtles, sea cucumbers, octopuses with startled eyes, giant clams with leering lips, and fish in more colors than dreamt of by Crayola” (104-5). These depictions give readers a greater sense of what stands to be lost, and cause them to appreciate the consequences of human modifications of nature. This technique is key to Kolbert’s narrative style: She alternates between anecdotes meant to entertain and engage the reader, and historical and scientific context.

Eventually, Kolbert moves beyond the standard framing of the journalist as an impartial observer and instead positions herself in the narrative as a character. She introduces readers to some of the most important players in the ongoing modification of the planet—and describes her interpersonal relationships with them. For example, we meet Ruth Gates, a coral scientist who pioneered the assisted evolution of corals. Kolbert shows us not only Gates as a researcher, but also as a person “so charismatic that […] I felt inspired by her” (94). Eventually, their dynamic became a friendship. Another instance of Kolbert participating in her subject happens when she describes being an early investor in the negative emissions technology being developed by the company Climeworks.