| UNDER A WHITE SKY The Nature of the Future Elizabeth Kolbert New York: Crown, February 2021 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-593-13627-0 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-593-13627-6 | 234pp. | HC/BWI | $28.00 | |
This book begins on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal, a waterway constructed early in the twentieth century to let Chicago deal with its sewage problem. It sent that sewage, treated, to be sure, down the Des Plaines River, thence through the Illinois and the Mississippi, and finally into the Gulf of Mexico. In doing so, it incidentally opened a channel between two great watersheds of North America: the Great Lakes and the Mississippi watersheds — a path that became non-incidental after Rachel Carson wrote Silent Spring.
If Chicago is the City of the Big Shoulders, the Sanitary and Ship Canal might be thought of as its Oversized Sphincter. Before it was dug, all of the city's waste—the hunman excrement, the cow manure, the sheep dung, the rotting viscera from the stockyards—ran into the Chicago River, which, in some spots, was so thick with filth it was said a chicken could walk from one bank to the other without getting her feet wet. From the river, the muck flowed into Lake Michigan. The lake was—and remains—the city's sole source of drinking water. Typhoid and cholera outbreaks were routine. *
* * But reversing the Chicagoo didn't just flush waste toward St. Louis. It also upended the hydrology of roughly two-thirds of the United States. This had ecological consequences, which had financial consequences, which, in turn, forced a whole new round of interventions on the backward-flowing river. – Pages 5 & 6 |
That round of intervention is one Elizabeth Kolbert takes a while to get to. It is the control of invasive Asian Carp, a voracious and adaptable species of fish which might spread from the Mississippi into Lake Michigan and the other Great Lakes — an event which, according to one Michigan politician, could "ruin our way of life."
After considering various methods of control, the Army Corps of Engineers chose an electric barrier: establishing an electric field at specific points in the river to deliver proportional shocks to fish depending on their size. A bigger fish encounters a larger difference in potential from head to tail — and the Asian Carp is a big fish. This, it was hoped, would discourage or kill Carps entering the field while allowing the free passage of ships. The author gives us no report on whether the fish are being blocked.
This Section of the book is undoubtedly the most entertaining, with its account of voyagers on the ship canal being barraged by flying Carp, which jump high out of the water when disturbed by motorboat rumble, and the competition to turn the fish into edible treats.
However, the other two Sections are in my view more educational. Section 2, "Into the Wild," concerns efforts to preserve the Devils Hole pupfish, found only at isolated underground pools in the Nevada desert, and corals of Australia's Great Barrier Reef, and to control the invasive cane toad population — all of which involve genetic engineering. Secion 3, "Up in the Air," concerns various schemes to pull carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere and to spray some sort of particles into the atmosphere (the stratosphere, specifically) to reflect sunlight, cooling the Earth. Both are controversial: the first because it is so expensive to operate at a scale that will make a real difference, the latter because of the risk of unintended consequences.
An informative text is augmented by a selection of black-and-white photographs, maps and diagrams. There are good endnotes and a list of photo credits, but no index. I'll give it top marks. But because it lacks and index, and because the state of the art with direct-air capture is changing so fast, I don't rate it a keeper.
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