![]() Kolbert’s reporting is, as always, skilful and subtle. By the end of the book, as the zany twists into the full-on apocalyptic, you are left reeling, with little hope to spare. Ever grander interventions ensue, which bring fresh calamities, which require still cleverer interventions. ![]() Grand, Promethean interventions of the sort of which modernity’s boosters were once so proud – a river’s flow reversed to carry waste to a more convenient location, an aquifer tapped to grow alfalfa in the desert, coal and oil extracted from great depths and burned to move machines – spawn unforeseen disasters. In Under a White Sky, she tracks the spiralling absurdity of human attempts to control nature with technology. Kolbert’s most recent book evokes another disquieting sensation, a novel breed of vertigo. It’s like being stuck in a tunnel and, no matter which direction you attempt to dig, only going deeper. ![]() You also know that almost everything you might do will belch out carbon emissions that will blow us farther down the path to catastrophe. If you’re paying attention – and if you’ve read Elizabeth Kolbert’s previous books on climate and the ongoing mass extinction – you know that the Earth, its atmosphere, and its oceans are transforming in ways that will mean unimaginable hardships for humans and for billions of other living beings. ![]() B eing alive these days means enduring a strange and perhaps historically unique sense of claustrophobia. ![]()
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