Later in “Under a White Sky,” Kolbert explores some proposed technological fixes for climate change, like solar geoengineering, in which scientists would inject reflective particles into the atmosphere to reflect sunlight back into space, cooling the planet.

Kolbert’s book also goes through technologies that have been used to raise submerged land in Louisiana, rescue a threatened fish species in Nevada and breed coral in Australia that could resist the ocean’s changing chemistry. “The Chicago River is a very vivid example of this.” “The book is about people intervening in natural systems, deciding they don’t particularly care for the results and then contemplating new forms of intervention to counter the old,” Kolbert said. To solve that problem, engineers installed electrified barriers in the Chicago River to keep carp from the Mississippi watershed away from Lake Michigan. But it also, through the Chicago River, connected two previously separated watersheds-the Mississippi River and the Great Lakes-allowing species to move from one to the other.Īs a result, watershed managers have been working tirelessly to keep invasive species out of the Great Lakes, including Asian carp, which could quickly proliferate and devastate ecosystems in all five Great Lakes. The river’s redirection was a victory for public health. More than a century ago, engineers reversed the flow of the polluted river away from Lake Michigan, which provided Chicago’s drinking water, diverting it instead into the Mississippi River watershed. In “Under a White Sky,” Kolbert begins with the Chicago River.

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