Welcome to Seeds of Story, where I explore the non-fiction that inspires—or should inspire—speculative fiction. Every couple weeks, we’ll dive into a book, article, or other source of ideas that are sparking current stories, or that have untapped potential to do so. Each article will include an overview of the source(s), a review of its readability and plausibility, and highlights of the best two or three “seeds” found there.
This week, I cover Elizabeth Kolbert’s Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. It covers how humans have tried to engineer nature, how that’s gone badly, and how we’re now trying to engineer fixes to our world-breaking failures. It’s both unsympathetic to the hubris with which we’ve claimed dominance—old boasts that “man every day is surpassing nature” earn example-ful criticism—and tentatively hopeful about our problem-solving abilities. It also reminds us that we should be careful, given how previous innovations have seeded the central problems of the Anthropocene.
What It’s About
Towards the end of Under a White Sky, Kolbert summarizes: “This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” Case in point: the 19th-century engineering marvel that reversed the Chicago River, connecting it to the Mississippi watershed. This addressed a problem that was itself deeply Anthropocene: the excrement and stockyard viscera that clogged the river and flowed into the city’s drinking water. Success led to a pointedly blunt headline: WATER IN CHICAGO RIVER NOW RESEMBLES LIQUID.
Combine that with another solution: DDT was first used as a military insecticide, then an agricultural one. It was a key part of WHO’s 1950s efforts to eradicate malaria. It also pushed bird populations to the brink of extinction. Rachel Carson’s 1962 Silent Spring founded the modern environmental movement and inspired a campaign to ban DDT. Carson suggested alternatives to chemical pesticides—such as using one biological agent, a targeted predator or parasite, to keep another in check. Following this advice, the US Fish and Wildlife Service imported Asian Carp to keep aquatic weeds in check. They also became part of wastewater treatment. Now they fill the Mississippi and threaten the Great Lakes through the inter-watershed connection created a century and a half ago. Enter new spider-to-catch-the-fly solutions, from electrified underwater fences to carp-bashing tournaments.
Similar patterns abound. Kolbert covers sinking ground in Louisiana, where efforts to keep the Mississippi from jumping course have interrupted the natural restoration of silt to the banks, and where efforts to maintain existing land worsen the problem long-term. Then there’s the human-driven Sixth Extinction (on which Kolbert’s written a whole separate book), and our efforts to curtail it. On the edge of Death Valley, a cave harbors pupfish whose entire habitat is confined to a 60×8 foot lightless pool. A mile away, a replica pool breeds supplementary pups, and may replace the original (threatened by pumping and radioactive waste). Around the world, some species thrive around humans (crows, cockroaches), while others are entirely shaped by our decisions (dogs, wheat), but many suffer from our activities. Some do fine after a boost, while others, like the pupfish, become “conservation-reliant.”
It’s not clear yet where reefs will fall on the extinction-to-reliance-to-recovery spectrum. Overheating bleaches many coral species, forcing them to expel algal symbionts gone haywire. If this goes on for too long, they starve. Kolbert visits a research aquarium in Australia, where coral and algae are bred for heat-tolerance, and tested against the projected conditions of 2050. Potentially, CRISPR gene drives could spread heat-resistance DNA through wild populations. Or robots might shade vulnerable ecosystems during heat events, or colder water could be drawn up from the deeper ocean. All options are risky, but something must be done unless we’re willing to lose a major ocean habitat.
Gene drives don’t only spread beneficial characteristics. They are also being tested for reducing populations of invasive cane toads and rodents. The term “mice-nine” appears.
From specific ecosystems and species, Kolbert moves to the atmosphere as a whole, and proposed engineering fixes to the boss-level Anthropocene problem of CO2 emissions. These range from injecting carbonized water into deep ground where it will mineralize, to planting trees (and then burying the mature ones rather than allowing them to fall and rot), to stratospheric aerosol injection. The first two directly address the problem—and in combination with reduced emissions could potentially get us into the realm of negative emissions, necessary for many of the most optimistic future climate models. Stratospheric aerosols could reduce immediate harm while we work on direct solutions—but could also lead to dramatic whiplash if paused before atmospheric carbon is successfully drawn down. It would also produce the white sky of the book’s title.
All of these solutions involve engineering a system larger and more complex than the Mississippi River. What remains to be seen is whether we’ve finally learned enough to create interventions that do more good than harm.
Buy the Book
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future
Kolbert’s first book, on Anthropocene mass extinction, is from all reports extremely good. It’s also a depressing enough topic that it has sat on my shelf for years, unread. It therefore wasn’t until this week, reading Under a White Sky as a companion to What the Wild Sea Can Be, that I discovered that Kolbert’s funny. She’s absolutely rigorous, offering detailed interviews and in-person experiences in places most deeply affected by the issues she’s discussing. But she also relishes warnings about getting face-slapped by carp, quotes researchers’ frustrations as they wait for coral to spawn in captivity, and describes a rodent biocontrol group as “Dr. Moreau joins Friends of the Earth.” She’s clear-eyed about the dangers of climate change and healthily skeptical about geoengineering, but her curiosity and humor are good companions for exploring both.
As I mentioned last time, my current work-in-progress involves high seas adventure during a time of severe geoengineering tradeoffs. Kolbert provides rich fodder. Stratospheric aerosol injections remain the idea that scares me the most. It’s easy to screw up, likely to mess with weather and crops in the most vulnerable places on earth, can be carried out unilaterally by a single powerful nation-state or amoral billionaire, requires the sort of consistent maintenance that we currently suck at, and is incredibly appealing to people still enamored of fossil fuels. It also—and this is the issue I haven’t seen anyone talk about, including Kolbert—seems likely to kick off an epidemic of permanent Seasonal Affective Disorder. White skies everywhere, year-round? Moon and stars blurred into a vague haze? This sounds literally miserable.
Most interventions aren’t quite that horrifying, but carry the same sort of “whoops, didn’t see that coming” risks as imported carp. Rewilding takes care and caution for just that reason. The right species can restore a whole ecosystem; the wrong one can destroy it. Outside Amsterdam, newly-introduced bison thrive in our dunelands, and the dunelands thrive from their presence. Beavers can fix whole watersheds and are sometimes better engineers than humans. But cane toads, deliberately introduced to Australia, are a toxic menace to everything that tries to eat them. If we try to control them with gene-drives, what further side effects might arise? Much geoengineering falls into the realm of desperation: the status quo is too a poor an option to accept.
Examining Greenland’s ice cores, Kolbert notes something alarming. For some time, the near-simultaneous emergence of fully-agricultural societies around the world has been a mystery—why 6000 years ago, and not 50,000 years earlier? Homo sapiens has been neurologically modern for much longer. You are not smarter than a Stone Age hunter-gatherer. Graeber and Scott lean toward agriculture as a hierarchy-promoting mistake, but that still doesn’t explain the synchronicity. The ice cores show the relatively stable climate of recent millennia to be an exception. “…in the midst of the last ice age, the climate of Greenland was so variable it could hardly be called a climate.” Average temperatures leapt 8 degrees C in 50 years, for example, then dropped back again. We see the same pattern in evidence from the Middle East, China and Europe. In such conditions, settling in one place long-term, let alone growing crops, simply doesn’t work. Nomadic hunting and gathering is the most adaptive choice. Then, post-Ice-Age, everything calms down: “All of civilization falls within this period of relative tranquility and so this sort of calm is what we take to be the norm.” Push the system out of that narrow balance, and it might not return any time soon.
The Best Seeds for Speculative Stories
Racing Against Carbon. Some of the most interesting, promising, and difficult climate mitigation options involve removing carbon from the atmosphere and ocean. Immediately pre-Anthropocene, animal exhalation and volcanic emissions were approximately balanced with plant-based and sedimentary drawdown, resulting in approximately 280 parts per million (ppm) of CO2. Now we’re above 400ppm and rising. We can plant more trees and algae, but that only goes so far, and unless we bury them carefully, the carbon is re-emitted when they rot. But if we inject enough CO2 underground, it will calcify and remain there. There are several different methods being tested, none currently scalable—but success would change our calculus dramatically. There’s ample room here for stories about both the technical race itself and the political wrangling required to combine it with real emissions reduction.
Rewilding the Spider to Catch the Fly. Both direct rewilding efforts, and the complications of invasive population management, make for great stories. We have to move beyond the myth of untouched wilderness—and speculative fiction in particular needs to think about what the future of nature looks like. How many ecosystems, and species, will require ongoing intervention? Can we return to an understanding—and a relationship—in which the human role in ecology is treated as natural? What conflicts will emerge between different approaches to that role? Groups training cane toad avoidance among predators may get along poorly with those developing gene drives for population reduction. (Or might learn to work together—geoengineering meet-cute, anyone?)
New Growth: What Else to Read
Kolbert regularly cites John McPhee’s The Control of Nature, a classic collection of essays on hubristic environmental engineering. His piece on the Mississippi’s imprisonment led to a plot point in A Half-Built Garden, and remains an ongoing obsession. Elizabeth Rush’s Rising: Dispatches from the New American Shore reports from communities in Louisiana and beyond dealing with disappearing land.
Project Drawdown collects an encyclopedia’s worth of climate solutions, calculating their potential carbon impact and offering guidance for implementation; in addition to the website they also offer their most central ideas in book form.
Kim Stanley Robinson’s The Ministry for the Future has become a core novel of climate mitigation. Don’t read it in the middle of a heat wave, or maybe do (but be prepared to obsessively check your local wet bulb temperature afterward). E.J. Swift’s When There Are Wolves Again is a slow burn tale of rewilding both places and hearts. Monica Byrne’s The Actual Star is one of the few stories I’ve read that imagines a post-agricultural world based on anything other than apocalyptic disaster. Sam Miller’s Blackfish City goes in a very different direction, with a new surge of hubristic engineering to create habitat for climate refugees in the Arctic.
Share your favorite tales of wild engineering in the comments!
