
Under a White Sky
Read by
Rebecca Lowman
Release:
02/09/2021
Release:
02/09/2021
Runtime:
6h 22m
Quantity:
#1 Amazon bestseller
Winner of an AudioFile Earphones Award
A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice of the Week
A Barack Obama Reading List Pick for 2021
An AudioFile Best Audiobook of the Year in Nonfiction
Shortlisted for the Wainwright Prize
A Washington Post Top 10 Book of 2021
A Time Magazine Best Book of the Year
A Smithsonian Magazine Pick of Best Books of 2021
An Esquire Magazine Best Book of the Year
A Vulture.com Pick of 2021's Best Books
A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2021
One of Kirkus Reviews’ Best Books of 2021
A Library Journal Book of the Year
The New York Times bestselling author of The Sixth Extinction and Field Notes from a Catastrophe returns to humanity’s transformative impact on the environment in Under a White Sky.
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. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The question we now face is: Can we change nature, this time in order to save it?
Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction, takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets scientists 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. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
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. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. The question we now face is: Can we change nature, this time in order to save it?
Elizabeth Kolbert, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction, takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets scientists 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. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.
Release:
2021-02-09
2021-02-09
Runtime:
Runtime:
6h 22m
6h 22m
Format:
audio
audio
Weight:
0.0 lb
0.53 lb
Language:
English
ISBN:
9781508255277
9781508255260
Praise