I sympathize with the urge to do something, even to use the questionable tools in our kit, but like Kolbert, I think it takes a lot of imagining to imagine that engineering problems have engineering solutions. And we do not have a good record of making equitable political decisions with respect to the world around us or the world to follow us. Assuming that, says Kolbert, “is a lot of imagining.” Scientists may originate these ideas and give advice, but implementation is a political decision and act. But here is the conundrum: If it could reduce the pain and suffering we have inflicted upon the world, if it could help prevent total collapse of damaged ecosystems, aren’t we obligated to try it? As one scientist puts it “No one would undergo chemotherapy if there were any options.”īut to imagine that attempting these techno-solutions is less dangerous than not attempting them is to be confident that not only the technology will work according to plan (never a given) but also that it will be used and maintained according to plan (not that many plans have a maintenance or exit program). Geoengineering is manifestly terrifying, with enormous potential to blow up in our faces. These are projects that scare even those who are working on them. So we are floundering around, striking at seemingly anything in the hopes of blindly hitting some desired target. We feel morally compelled to try to clean up our own messes, or at least reduce the damaging effects on innocents like coral and pupfish and future humans. The magnitude of suffering we have unleashed drives all these undertakings. This is merely the best anyone has come up with in the context of wicked problems that likely have no best solutions.

Nobody believes these projects are the best. There is little rosy techno-optimism, quite a bit of grim techno-fatalism.

And that is the dilemma.Īs Kolbert says, “This is a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Without exception, the people she talks with are committed to their work, but their passion is hollowed by doubt. Or the skies would be white - whether we’d be living is debatable.

If we were to seed the sky with particulates and chemicals to dim the sun and cool the earth, we would be living under white skies. Kolbert dispassionately reports on schemes to mitigate the multiple disasters we have created for ourselves - from climate change and ecological collapse to attempts to save isolated desert pupfish species from extinction. In Under a White Sky Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction, examines the future world we are engineering.

Under a white sky by elizabeth kolbert