Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature.

In 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. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact.

“Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment.”-Helen Macdonald, The New York Times.

ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal.ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post.SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING.RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it?.

Under a white sky elizabeth kolbert