Under a White Sky

How do you live on a planet you've completely transformed? Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky begins with this haunting question, showing how humanity’s endless tinkering with the natural world has created a paradox: we've altered Earth so thoroughly that saving it now requires yet more intervention. Kolbert argues that while our technological power has reached astonishing heights—the ability to reverse rivers, electrify waterways, edit genes, engineer ecosystems, and even dim the sun—that same power has entangled us in a feedback loop. Every solution leads to new problems. Every attempt to restore balance demands still greater control. This is not just the “Anthropocene,” she writes—it’s the era of the control of the control of nature.

Kolbert organizes her book around three major explorations of this theme: the reshaped rivers and invasive species of the Midwest, the sinking delta and vanished coasts of Louisiana, and the global scientific efforts to genetically and technologically re-engineer ecosystems and the climate itself. What connects these stories is the uncomfortable truth that there’s no pristine nature left to go back to. As she puts it, we live with “a planet remade,” where even solutions—electric fish barriers, synthetic coral breeding, or solar geoengineering—are themselves acts of domination over Earth’s systems.

A Planet of Human Footprints

Kolbert begins metaphorically and historically with rivers—the Chicago River reversal, devised to stop pollution flowing into Lake Michigan. She illustrates how this feat of nineteenth-century engineering symbolized humanity’s mastery of natural forces. Yet soon, new ecological cascades appeared: invasive Asian carp exploited this reversed flow, bred uncontrollably, and threatened the Great Lakes ecosystem. And so, engineers developed electric barriers to shock or repel fish, sometimes killing thousands in the process. What started as one act of control required another and another—a microcosm of modern environmentalism.

When Restoration Becomes Engineering

From rivers, Kolbert moves to the Mississippi Delta. Here, the paradox of control deepens. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers successfully restrained the mighty river with miles of levees to prevent flooding, but that protection also stopped fresh sediment from renewing Louisiana’s fragile wetlands. As a result, entire parishes have begun sinking into the sea. The state’s newest strategy for saving the coast now involves drilling artificial channels called “sediment diversions” to mimic natural flooding—a plan that costs billions and depends on the same engineering logic that caused the problem. Kolbert’s Louisiana chapters are equal parts scientific exploration and tragic irony: she shows that restoring nature now means recreating it artificially, one engineered marsh at a time.

Inventing Synthetic Nature

In the book’s middle section, Kolbert travels from Nevada’s desert springs, where scientists artificially preserve endangered fish like the Devils Hole pupfish, to the labs of Hawaii and Australia, where coral biologists breed “super corals” genetically tuned to withstand warming oceans. She encounters gene-editing researchers manipulating cane toads and mice for ecological control, and climate scientists experimenting with technologies to remove carbon or reflect sunlight back into space. These are not the villains of the story—they’re the heroes and caretakers—but their work raises thorny questions: if we’re now engineering life and climate to fix our earlier mistakes, are we solving problems or simply reinventing them under a white, artificial sky?

Why These Stories Matter to You

For the reader, Kolbert’s narrative lands uncomfortably close to home. Every policy, every technology, every act of development—even well-intentioned conservation—forces us to choose between inaction and intervention. Do you save coral reefs by breeding new hybrid species, knowing they’ll never truly be natural again? Do you reverse climate change by seeding reflective aerosols into the stratosphere, knowing the consequences might be global? Under a White Sky asks whether humans, having become geological forces, can learn not only to steer the planet but to do so wisely. Kolbert doesn’t promise optimism; she offers wisdom through humility and urgency. The last line—“silver carp glisten under a white sky”—captures that haunting synthesis: a world both saved and remade beyond recognition.

Kolbert opens her exploration on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal—a river turned backward through one of history’s grandest feats of engineering. This reversal, completed in 1900, was hailed as progress: sewage no longer flowed into Lake Michigan, ensuring cleaner water for the booming metropolis. Yet, as Kolbert recounts in vivid travelogue style, that victory carried ecological shockwaves stretching from Illinois to the Gulf of Mexico. The river’s rechanneling opened pathways for species invasions, altered vast drainage basins, and forced new generations of humans to confront unintended consequences.

The Asian Carp Paradox

The central creature in this saga is the Asian carp—a superfish imported to control aquatic weeds after Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring made chemical controls controversial. What was once ecological stewardship became biological aggression. Asian carp escaped containment ponds and spread northward, devouring plankton and displacing native species. Kolbert describes her journey with biologists and fishermen who fight to contain them, hauling tons of fish from rivers manually and enforcing electric barriers funded by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. Ironically, these same barriers—an electrified river system—represent another layer of control meant to solve the original error. The fish that were imported to prevent environmental damage became ecological weapons requiring technological combat.

The Control of the Control of Nature

Kolbert zooms out from the carp wars to show that this logic defines our era. Humanity has dammed or diverted almost every major river, altered nitrogen cycles more than all natural systems combined, and turned atmospheric chemistry into something unprecedented. Her phrase—the control of the control of nature—captures this recursive bind. We can’t stop intervening because our previous interventions made withdrawal impossible. Chicago engineers once bragged they had conquered disease by engineering rivers; today’s biologists use electricity and noise to ward off the biological fallout of those very changes. It’s a tragic loop of ingenuity.

Lessons for the Anthropocene

For readers, Kolbert’s river chapters offer a lesson in humility. Fixing one environmental problem often means creating another layer of complexity. When Michigan politicians declare that Asian carp could “ruin our way of life,” Kolbert quietly notes that this “way of life” was built by reversing rivers and electrifying them in the first place. The Anthropocene, she implies, isn’t just an age of impact—it’s an age of stewardship without exit. Once humans become planetary managers, every act of control becomes both necessary and dangerous.

Kolbert’s second major journey takes her south along the Mississippi River to Louisiana, one of the fastest-disappearing landscapes on Earth. Here she captures the tragic geography of Plaquemines Parish—a place literally built by the river’s sediment and now crumbling into the Gulf. Over the last century, levees and flood controls designed to protect communities have dismantled the very processes that created those lands. Through interviews with engineers, parish officials, and residents, Kolbert shows how human ingenuity—meant to prevent disaster—has instead engineered slow-motion catastrophe.

Harnessing, Shackling, and Sinking

The Army Corps of Engineers once boasted that they had “harnessed and shackled” the Mississippi. Kolbert reminds you that this control stopped the river from flooding—but also stopped it from renewing its delta with new layers of silt. Each spring flood that never happened translated into land loss: Louisiana loses a football field’s worth every ninety minutes. Kolbert’s description of flying over the Bird’s Foot Delta—its disappearing fingers of land—is eerily cinematic. It’s the price of stability. The landscapes that once breathed with seasonal cycles are now petrified under human maintenance.

Engineering Restoration

In Baton Rouge, Kolbert visits scientists modeling flood scenarios with miniature replicas of the delta. She watches engineers literally re-create Louisiana’s coast inside a lab, using plastic pellets and pumps to simulate sediment flow. Their goal: design controlled crevasses—artificial floods—that rebuild marshland lost to earlier levee projects. The most ambitious plan is the Mid-Barataria Sediment Diversion, a proposed billion-dollar man-made river to deliver sand back into dying wetlands. The paradox is obvious. The state must now use greater engineering to undo the effects of past engineering. Every restored acre costs tens of thousands of dollars and may subside again within a decade.

Lessons from a Drowning Coast

Kolbert evocatively portrays communities like Isle de Jean Charles, home to the Biloxi-Chitimacha-Choctaw Tribe, where residents are being relocated inland after their ancestral island vanished. Once ignored, they are now beholden to climate adaptation programs dictating their survival. Through these human stories, Kolbert turns the technical saga of sediment pipelines into a meditation on justice and displacement. What happens when the cost of staying put exceeds the cost of leaving? Her conclusion is sobering: modern civilization builds barriers to hold back nature, then spends billions to reopen them once more. Plaquemines Parish, she writes, is both laboratory and warning—a vivid demonstration that control is not preservation.

In the book’s most forward-looking section, Kolbert plunges into the world of gene editing, genetic rescue, and human-made evolution. Through visits to labs in Australia and the United States, she illustrates how biologists now manipulate genomes not just to understand life but to repair ecosystems. This stretches the logic of control into biology itself—humans becoming planetary engineers at the level of code.

CRISPR and the New Creators

Kolbert uses the example of scientist Josiah Zayner, who sells DIY genetic kits for home experimenters. He symbolizes a culture where modifying organisms is now casual. Yet even serious researchers face moral dilemmas. In Australian high-containment labs, scientists like Mark Tizard experiment with editing the poison genes of invasive cane toads—a biological nightmare originally unleashed by humans to combat beetle pests in sugarcane fields. They hope CRISPR can “break” the toads’ lethal enzymes and make them safe prey again. Kolbert finds beauty and unease in such work; it resembles divine repair, yet it carries echoes of hubris.

Self-Propagating Solutions

Perhaps the most chilling innovation is the gene drive—genetic elements that can spread themselves through populations faster than ordinary inheritance. Scientists foresee both promise and peril: drives could eliminate malaria-carrying mosquitoes or, conversely, erase entire species. Kolbert compares the technology to Kurt Vonnegut’s “ice-nine”—a substance capable of freezing all water globally. With gene drives, one changed organism could alter ecosystems planet-wide. Researchers struggle to build safeguards that would make such drives self-limiting or reversible, yet Kolbert notes the haunting irony: these safeguards are merely new layers of control over an uncontrollable template—evolution itself.

We Are as Gods

Kolbert recalls Stewart Brand’s famous statement, “We are as gods and might as well get good at it,” reframed as obligation rather than celebration. Genetic rescue projects like resurrecting chestnut trees or manipulating coral symbionts are attempts to heal what earlier human interventions broke. But as she notes, this “repair” depends on further manipulation—wheat genes grafted into trees, lab-bred corals seeded into oceans. Quoting Paul Kingsnorth, she warns that we’ve become “Loki, killing the beautiful for fun.” The question remains: can humanity get good at being gods, or will our fixes merely deepen our divine mistakes?

Few chapters are as emotionally powerful as Kolbert’s portrait of coral scientist Ruth Gates. Watching television as a child, Gates fell in love with Jacques Cousteau’s vivid underwater world. Decades later, she studies that same world’s disintegration. Corals are dying from heat waves, acidification, and pollution, threatening the ocean ecosystems that sustain billions of lives. Rather than mourn, Gates decides to intervene: she dreams of breeding “super corals” capable of surviving a climate humans have remade.

Designing Resilience

Gates’s research at the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology focuses on assisted evolution—speeding up natural adaptation through selective breeding and genetic partnerships with algae. Kolbert follows her team as they raise corals under heat stress, crossbreed survivors, and cultivate new strains in outdoor tanks. This work is both hopeful and unsettling. The scientists are saving an ecosystem’s essence while altering its identity. Gates insists she’s not undoing nature but preparing it for a future where “nature is no longer fully natural.” It’s evolution, accelerated and intentional.

The Global Experiment

Kolbert’s visits to Australian labs reveal another dimension: coral embryos and algae symbionts engineered to endure unprecedented heat. Researchers like Madeleine van Oppen and Kate Quigley test hybridization and microbial “probiotics” for coral resilience. Nighttime scenes of coral spawning in tanks—orgies of life orchestrated by human hands—symbolize both triumph and tragedy. As Kolbert notes, the Great Barrier Reef, larger than Italy, may soon require artificial maintenance akin to agriculture. What had been wild wonder becomes managed resilience.

Is Saving the Reef Still Natural?

For you as a reader, this tension defines modern conservation. Can ecological engineering coexist with humility? Kolbert doesn’t condemn the coral biologists—she admires their commitment—but she shows how their hope depends on technologies that make the reef less wild. Assisted evolution, she suggests, is emblematic of our age: to save what’s natural, humans must make it artificial. The result may not be the disappearance of the Great Barrier Reef but its transformation into an Anthropocene artifact—an “Okay Barrier Reef.”

The final section of Kolbert’s book moves from ecosystems to the atmosphere itself. Here, she meets scientists determined to fix climate change not through emissions cuts but through chemistry and design—“negative emissions” and “solar geoengineering.” The stakes are planetary, and the tone shifts from field reportage to moral inquiry: what happens when saving Earth means rewriting its mechanisms?

Turning CO₂ into Stone

Kolbert travels to Iceland’s Hellisheiði Power Station, where engineers inject captured carbon dioxide into volcanic rock, turning gas into solid calcium carbonate. The process mimics natural fossilization but compresses millennia into months. It’s startlingly elegant and deeply ironic—industrial intervention as geological restoration. She frames this as emblematic of the Anthropocene’s logic: to fix climate change, we must accelerate geological processes ourselves. Scientists like Klaus Lackner envision “carbon scrubber” machines carpeting deserts to draw CO₂ from air, comparing atmospheric pollution to sewage that must be managed perpetually.

Dimming the Sun

Kolbert then introduces solar geoengineering—the proposal to spray reflective particles into the stratosphere, imitating volcanic cooling. Harvard researchers David Keith and Frank Keutsch debate whether experiments should proceed, fearing both moral hazard and political misuse. The imagined future sky literally turns whiter, mirroring Kolbert’s title. The technique could theoretically cool the planet rapidly, but its side effects—shifting rainfall patterns, ozone depletion, termination shock—read like science fiction made real. Kolbert’s interviews reveal scientists torn between skepticism and dread; they study geoengineering precisely because someone, someday, might deploy it in desperation.

The Final Paradox

Kolbert closes with Greenland’s melting glaciers, linking ancient climate records to modern upheaval. Humanity’s drive to control nature, once symbolized by reversing a river, now extends to the climate itself. The sky may soon whiten not from clouds but from engineered aerosols. Her verdict is not condemnation but reflection: maybe managing Earth is the only path left—but every fix carries its own peril. In this age, she writes, the choice may be between catastrophe by inaction and catastrophe by intervention. Either way, our future will unfold under a white sky.