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Under a white sky by elizabeth kolbert5/12/2023 ![]() ![]() In Chicago, more than a century after the dredging of a canal – “the biggest public works project of its time” – accidentally “upended the hydrology of roughly two-thirds of the United States”, engineers struggle to contain the spread of voracious species of carp introduced to gobble propeller-tangling weeds. She jets across continents, visiting laboratories and warehouse-sized scale models of damaged ecosystems through which scientists traipse like giants. She plays a wry and melancholy Virgil touring varied sterile hells, savouring ironies even when they hurt. 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. ![]()
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