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Cover of Under a White Sky by Elizabeth Kolbert

Under a White Sky

  • 256 pages · about 4 hours
  • First published 2021
  • 12 editions

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1 About this book

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.

Good for readers who want: the environment, nature, and science.

  • Nature, effect of human beings on
  • Human ecology
  • Environmental protection
  • Environmental management
  • Nature
  • Science
  • Environmental sciences
  • Environmental Conservation & Protection

2 About Elizabeth Kolbert

Born 1961

Elizabeth Kolbert (born July 6, 1961) is an American author and journalist. Since 1999, she has been a staff writer for The New Yorker, where she has covered politics and the environment. She is the author of six books, including The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (a New York Times bestseller and Pulitzer Prize winner) and Under a White Sky, which was one of Washington Post's ten best books of 2021.

Bio adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0)

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