10 min · 10 chaptersNarrated in your voice
Original summary · AI-drafted, human-published · added by Library
What it's about
Elizabeth Kolbert examines how humans, having already reshaped the planet through pollution, extinction, and climate change, now face a choice: use even more aggressive technological intervention to manage the damage, or accept catastrophic loss. She profiles scientists and engineers attempting to control invasive species, re-engineer coral reefs, and even dim the sun. The book argues that we have moved past the point where restraint alone can fix what we've broken, forcing uncomfortable questions about hubris, control, and unintended consequences.
Reading plan
Pick a finish date and Genius lays out the days — the plan shows today's target and keeps you honest.
Read together
Start a circle and share the code — everyone sees everyone's honest place in the book. Accountability, not leaderboards.
Who it's for
- Readers of environmental journalism who want the sequel to thinking about climate change past denial and into engineering - People curious about gene editing, geoengineering, or invasive species control and what these actually look like in practice - Anyone wrestling with whether more technology is the solution to problems technology created
What’s inside
- 1Down the Chicago River1 min
Attempts to fix one human-caused ecological problem routinely create new problems that require further intervention, trapping us in an escalating cycle of control.
- 2The Muddy Mississippi1 min
Efforts to control the Mississippi River for navigation and flood prevention have destroyed the very land they were meant to protect, and now require artificial land-building to compensate.
- 3Gene Drives Against Invasive Species1 min
Gene editing offers a way to eliminate invasive species at the genetic level, but releasing self-propagating genetic changes into wild populations is close to irreversible.
- 4Engineering Coral for a Hotter World1 min
Scientists are now breeding and engineering coral to survive conditions that would kill their natural ancestors, effectively replacing wild evolution with directed selection.
- 5Fighting Water With Salt: Desalination and Groundwater1 min
Solving water scarcity through techno-fixes like desalination trades one resource problem for another, namely energy consumption and brine waste.
- 6Geoengineering and the White Sky1 min
Solar geoengineering, deliberately dimming sunlight to cool the planet, could work at a technical level but would permanently change the sky's color and create risks no single nation can control.
- 7Living With What We've Made1 min
The book's scattered case studies converge on the argument that humans must now manage nature permanently rather than restore it, because the systems we depend on no longer function without intervention.
About Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and author of The Sixth Extinction, which won the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 2015. She has covered environmental science and policy for decades, combining field reporting with rigorous synthesis of scientific literature.
What readers say
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