Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

“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. Choose just about any metric you want and it tells the same story. People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains. We have damned or diverted most of the world’s major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do.”

Kolbert sets up the stakes for the book: Humans are now the dominant force shaping life on the planet. Some of the specific impacts she will address are the channeling of rivers and climate change. Here, we see an instance of Kolbert’s strategy throughout the book—relying on scientific research, history, and literature to illustrate her point—in this case, the book of Genesis, in the Bible.

“One year after Silent Spring’s publication, in 1963, the US Fish and Wildlife Service brought the first documented shipment of Asian carp to America. The idea was to use the carp, much as Carson had recommended, to keep aquatic weeds in check. (Weeds like Eurasian watermilfoil—another introduced species—can clog lakes and ponds so thoroughly that boats or even swimmers can’t get through.) The fish were baby grass carp—‘fingerlings’—and they were raised at the agency’s Fish Farming Experimental Station in Stuttgart, Arkansas. Three years later, biologists at the station succeeded in getting one of the carp—now grown—to spawn. Thousands more fingerlings resulted. Pretty much immediately, some escaped.”

Kolbert explores that Asian carp in the Mississippi are now threatening the Great Lakes, prompting measures such as the use of electric barriers on the Chicago River to prevent the fish’s passage. This problem is manmade: Asian carp were introduced as biocontrol, a deliberate attempt to curb other invasive species. Initially seen as a preferable alternative to the use of chemicals, they ultimately became a bigger problem than the one they were introduced to solve—a fact that highlights one of the book’s themes, that of the unintended consequences of attempts to modify nature.

“The cakes he’d brought to CarpFest had been made from fish caught in Louisiana. These had been frozen and shipped to Ho Chi Minh City. There, Parola related, the carp had been thawed, processed, vacuum-packed, refrozen, and put on another container ship, bound for New Orleans. In a concession to Americans’ anti-carp prejudice, he’d rechristened the fish ‘silverfin,’ a term he’d had trademarked.”

Some of the numerous measures to control Asian carp include fishing tournaments that attempt to make carp into a food fish (a plausible option, given that it is eaten by people in its native habitat, China). Carp have a bad reputation due to their negative impacts on ecosystems in the United States, leading to their rebranding as “silverfin.