Under a White Sky
Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a super coral that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation.
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67% recommend33% neutral
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What Hacker News says
- This is an over statement. I, too, have read Slouching Towards Utopia and Steven Pinker. But (a) technology is not a monolith, it's clearly nice to have enough food and modern medicine while it's also terrible that we're destroying our biome or facing increased illiteracy due to social media. Also (b) technology, like beer, is both the cause of AND the solution to all problems. Harari and James C. Scott make compelling arguments about how agriculture, among the first widely adopted technologies, deprived us of a utopia that we're scrambling to recover with more technology ever since. I call this the Operation Cat Drop problem. See also Under a White Sky.
- Read Elizabeth Kolbert’s “Under A White Sky” for a history of how best-intentioned interventions into ecologies have consistently backfired, in each case the unpredictable and far reaching complexity of the system was thrown out of balance.
I think the commenter’s admonition may have been expressing the the same lesson: its hubristic to “fix” systems with hacks like this; whereas carbon drawdown is not a hack, because it operates within the mechanism of imbalance itself.
For my part, this article had so little reporting of the complexity of ocean ecosystems and the potential dangers, not to mention how it buried the bit about how carbon intensive lye is (the same reason that makes concrete have such a huge carbon footprint) that it read like a puff piece.
- It's honestly like you've never seen that land.
Much of Canada -- one of the two big possible breadbaskets you said you were eyeing -- is literally forest. The forest starts where the farmland stops.
Even if you cleared the forest, the soil is worthless. It's been covered in conifers for thousands of years. It's also goopy, as it is thawing. Or sandy. Or simply too acidic.
And while it might be good enough for grasses and cattle grazing one day, that day is not today, nor tomorrow, and in the meantime, you will be quite hungry.
In the medium term: good luck replacing California's food output with northern Alberta's.
Now, one might be able to hasten the soil improvement that with some sort of complex, time-consuming terraforming ('agriforming?') process, but good luck getting that process to scale in a hurry. Or on-budget. (Have fun even making a budget for that.)
Farming is actually just incredibly hard, the land is the biggest variable. It has to be just right. You can't just declare that an area is for food production like you'd rezone a city street for residential. Nature does not care about your lines on maps.
Don't believe me? Look at the last time we tried. The same reason that turning the Amazonian rainforest into farmland has not been an awesome thing.
And who is condescending to who, here? I'm not a farmer. But neither, I suspect, are you. So why do you discount my experience? I'm from the place you were talking about.
My suspicion is that you simply cannot tolerate the ego-dystonicity of ushering in an age of starvation for our children and grandchildren. But we did it. You did it, with help.
Check the prices at your supermarket.[1] Check the collapsing populations of insects, birds, and fish. Wait for the unravel to travel further up the food chain. Tag. You're it.
And yes, it's apocalyptic. It really, really is.
If you want to throw textbooks around, please read _This Changes Everything_. Then, read _Under a White Sky_.
You will find them both in the nonfiction section.
[1] Before you get typing: yes, inflation and supply-chain disruption can be symptoms of climate change -- specifically, when both are occasioned by a pandemic, which is the sort of event that becomes more common as habitats are squeezed up against one another. There will be more, faster now. I did PhD work on this, back in '05, in the aftermath of SARS-CoV-1. Like.
- Is it fair to future generations who are yet to be born to write off the possibility of their ever being born because we're selfish and want to live forever? There is some limit to the number of humans we can support on earth, so if everyone is living millions of years (or more realistically let's say hundreds of years) we would have to drastically cut the world's reproduction rates.
Maybe I'm overthinking it, but I feel like that is the classic hubris of mankind to aspire to become gods. We want to control nature and life, yet our limited knowledge prevents us from understanding the ramifications of our actions until it is too late. (Under a White Sky is an interesting read on the subject)
- I sadly forgot where I read about it (maybe "Under a White Sky" by Elizabeth Kolbert) but the States do already pay people to mass-cull these Asian carp by the literal ton (found https://blogs.illinois.edu/view/7362/827782934 specifically about this point). It's crazy what extremes governments are going to try to contain these fish - to include generating an electric field in rivers that selectively kills fish over a certain size (i.e. Asian carp).
- Pumping sulfur up, a dangerous game if you can't keep doing it all the way to the time when CO2 scrubbing fusion plants save your crispy bacon. There is a recent book named: under a white sky.
