



Under a White Sky (Unabridged)
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4.3 • 43 Ratings
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
AudioFile Magazine’s Best Audiobooks of 2021
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.
APPLE BOOKS REVIEW
In this compelling audiobook, Pulitzer-winning environmental reporter Elizabeth Kolbert seeks to discover whether human ingenuity can undo our own damage to the planet. The Sixth Extinction author’s riveting narrative goes everywhere from the Mojave Desert to the Chicago River to outer space, all on a mission to meet the scientists and innovators who are devoted to that goal—like Dr. Edda Aradottir, the head of a business called Carbfix that converts carbon dioxide in the atmosphere into rocks. As with her previous books, Kolbert isn’t afraid to confront inconvenient or uncomfortable truths about how humans created these environmental problems in the first place. But still—hearing about the people working proactively to salvage and re-engineer our biosphere is incredibly encouraging. Rebecca Lowman’s steady, impassioned narration guides us through the exciting journey. Get ready to learn how many man-made problems might also have man-made solutions.