Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

Elizabeth Kolbert, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American author and a staff writer at The New Yorker, has written extensively on environmental subjects and climate change. Her other books include The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, as well as Field Notes from a Catastrophe. As a journalist, she’s also won two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In the book, she draws on her extensive experience reporting on humanity’s capacity for planetary destruction and modification. Kolbert includes herself in the narrative, describing her awe-filled reactions to the natural world and her skepticism toward the interventions meant to mimic or preserve it.

Throughout the book, Kolbert often writes in the first-person, using humor and incisive observation to bring human management of nature to life. The first-person also establishes her credibility in the subject matter, and deepens the reader’s understanding of the stakes. When describing a week at a research station on the Great Barrier Reef, Kolbert draws on her long experience writing about the natural world to invite the reader to wonder at that world—in this case, the prodigious biodiversity of coral reefs, where she saw “sharks, dolphins, manta rays, sea turtles, sea cucumbers, octopuses with startled eyes, giant clams with leering lips, and fish in more colors than dreamt of by Crayola” (104-5).