

It's a tribute to Kolbert's skills as a storyteller that she transforms the quest to deal with the climate crisis into a darkly comic tale of human hubris and imagination that could either end in flames or in a new vision of Paradise." -Jeff Goodell, Rolling Stone "A superb and honest reflection of our extraordinary time." - Nature "Important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting. "To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth, you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert.


By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-year exercise in defying nature. Along the way, she meets biologists 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. In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it's said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER - The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: After doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? RECOMMENDED BY PRESIDENT OBAMA AND BILL GATES - SHORTLISTED FOR THE WAINWRIGHT PRIZE FOR WRITING - ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post - ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Time, Esquire, Smithsonian Magazine, Vulture, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, Library Journal - "Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment."-Helen Macdonald, The New York Times 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.
