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koreanlinda's review
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
informative
inspiring
reflective
tense
medium-paced
5.0
After The Sixth Extinction, Elizabeth Kolbert wrote another masterpiece.
The book consists of three parts: Down the River, Into the Wild, and Up in the Air. While Kolbert covers water, land, and sky on her feet and in writing, she also divides each part into small chapters (approximately 15 pages) detailing each project she has researched over the years, which made it easy for me to make daily progress.
One of the thrills in reading this book, in addition to the underlying suspense from a global doom, is going to various countries and meeting all sorts of people on Kolbert's research trips. She flies, rides boats, and drives rental cars. She has a talent for unfolding her research process and findings with a sense of moving so tangible that I feel like I'm reading a travel book. Since environmental research often entails a study of history, as far back as hundred thousands of years, it almost feels like we are traveling time as well.
The Sixth Extinction focused on how the human intervention of nature has brought a mass-scale extinction upon ourselves. In Under a White Sky, the message is not that we need to stop meddling with nature; it's rather that the only way we can undo the effects of our intervention is more intervention. It could sound counter-intuitive, but there is a clear distinction between two "interventions" in this sentence. If the earlier one's purpose was exploiting nature for short-term benefits (limited to some humans), the latter one's purpose is recovering nature for long-term benefits for all the creatures on earth. The shift came from learning that we cannot separate ourselves from our environment and that all things are connected, beyond what we can fathom with our current capability.
The book consists of three parts: Down the River, Into the Wild, and Up in the Air. While Kolbert covers water, land, and sky on her feet and in writing, she also divides each part into small chapters (approximately 15 pages) detailing each project she has researched over the years, which made it easy for me to make daily progress.
One of the thrills in reading this book, in addition to the underlying suspense from a global doom, is going to various countries and meeting all sorts of people on Kolbert's research trips. She flies, rides boats, and drives rental cars. She has a talent for unfolding her research process and findings with a sense of moving so tangible that I feel like I'm reading a travel book. Since environmental research often entails a study of history, as far back as hundred thousands of years, it almost feels like we are traveling time as well.
The Sixth Extinction focused on how the human intervention of nature has brought a mass-scale extinction upon ourselves. In Under a White Sky, the message is not that we need to stop meddling with nature; it's rather that the only way we can undo the effects of our intervention is more intervention. It could sound counter-intuitive, but there is a clear distinction between two "interventions" in this sentence. If the earlier one's purpose was exploiting nature for short-term benefits (limited to some humans), the latter one's purpose is recovering nature for long-term benefits for all the creatures on earth. The shift came from learning that we cannot separate ourselves from our environment and that all things are connected, beyond what we can fathom with our current capability.
"Our project [of growing more stress-resistant coral reefs] is acknowledging that a future is coming where nature is no longer fully natural." - Ruth Gates, the former director of the Hawaii Institute of Marine Biology
"The classic thing people say with molecular biology is: Are you playing God? Well, no. We are using our understanding of biological processes to see if we can benefit a system that is in trauma." - Mark Tizard at Australian Animal Health Lab
It can drain one's energy to hear all things going wrong environmentally; however, I came across a source of incredible hope at the end of the book: Acknowledgments. Kolbert writes paragraph after paragraph who helped her research on every project from Chicago River to Australia to Iceland to Greenland. At each place, Kolbert met people who are dedicating their lives to do what they can for the common goal of helping the earth recover from its "trauma." And thanks to her writing, now we can meet them on these pages.
Review by Linda (she/they) in Jan. 2022
Twitter @KoreanLindaPark
Letter writer at DefinitelyNotOkay.com
Content Warnings
Minor: Animal cruelty and Animal death
nrogers_1030's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.5
Content Warnings
Minor: Animal cruelty
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