Why do we need to rebuild a sinking Louisiana? In large part because we solved the problem of seasonal flooding by penning the river between enormous levees, which meant the land-building sediment that came with those floods no longer arrived.
As she puts it, this is a book “about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” The thought at the center of this wonderful book is that not only do we humans do a lot of damage to the planet, some of the worst damage we do occurs when we’re trying to fix things. In each of these trips, she tells of disaster - of invasive species and endangered ones, of coral bleaching, of the rapid land loss in south Louisiana. But even if some of it was familiar to me - both as a reader of The New Yorker and as a science writer who covers some of the same topics myself - I wanted to read it through, to see these pieces come together into an overarching argument. She writes for The New Yorker, where portions of “Under a White Sky” first appeared. Her Pulitzer Prize-winning 2014 book “The Sixth Extinction” made the disappearance of species understandable and urgent. With her lively, vivid writing, Kolbert is one of the nation’s most high-profile science writers.
BOOK REVIEW - “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future,” by Elizabeth Kolbert (Crown, 256 pages).
0 kommentar(er)
