Copyright © 2021 by Elizabeth Kolbert
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All rights reserved.
Published in the United States by Crown, an imprint of Random House, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York.
Crown and the Crown colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.
Portions of this work originally appeared in The New Yorker.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Kolbert, Elizabeth, author.
Title: Under a white sky / Elizabeth Kolbert.
Description: First edition. | New York: Crown, [2021] | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020047398 (print) | LCCN 2020047399 (ebook) | ISBN 9780593136270 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780593238776 | ISBN 9780593136294 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Nature—Effect of human beings on. | Human ecology. | Environmental protection. | Ecological engineering. | Sustainability.
Classification: LCC GF75 .K65 2021 (print) | LCC GF75 (ebook) | DDC 304.2/8—dc23
LC record available at lccn.loc.gov/2020047398
LC ebook record available at lccn.loc.gov/2020047399
Ebook ISBN 9780593136294
crownpublishing.com
Book design by Simon M. Sullivan, adapted for ebook
Cover design: Christopher Brand
ep_prh_5.6.1_c0_r2
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Epigraph
Down the River
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Into the Wild
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Up in the Air
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Dedication
Acknowledgments
Notes
Credits
By Elizabeth Kolbert
About the Author
Sometimes he runs his hammer along the walls, as though to give the signal to the great waiting machinery of rescue to swing into operation. It will not happen exactly in this way—the rescue will begin in its own time, irrespective of the hammer—but it remains something, something palpable and graspable, a token, something one can kiss, as one cannot kiss rescue.
Franz Kafka
1
Rivers make good metaphors—too good, perhaps. They can be murky and charged with hidden meaning, like the Mississippi, which to Twain represented “the grimmest and most dead-earnest of reading matter.” Alternatively, they can be bright and clear and mirror-like. Thoreau set off for a week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers and within a day found himself lost in reflection over the reflections he saw playing on the water. Rivers can signify destiny, or coming into knowledge, or coming upon that which one would rather not know. “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth,” Conrad’s Marlow recalls. They can stand for time, for change, and for life itself. “You can’t step into the same river twice,” Heraclitus is supposed to have said, to which one of his followers, Cratylus, is supposed to have replied, “You can’t step into the same river even once.”
It is a bright morning following several days of rain, and the not-quite-river I am riding is the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The canal is a hundred and sixty feet wide and runs as straight as a ruler. Its waters, the shade of old cardboard, are flecked with candy wrappers and bits of Styrofoam. On this particular morning, traffic consists of barges hauling sand, gravel, and petrochemicals. The one exception is the vessel I’m on, a pleasure craft named City Living.
City Living is outfitted with off-white banquettes and a canvas awning that snaps smartly in the breeze. Also on board are the boat’s captain and owner and several members of a group called Friends of the Chicago River. The Friends are not a fastidious bunch. Often their outings involve wading knee-deep in polluted water to test for fecal coliform. Still, our expedition is slated to take us farther down the canal than any of them has ever been before. Everyone is excited and, if truth be told, also a little creeped out.
We have made our way into the canal from Lake Michigan, via the Chicago River’s South Branch, and now are motoring west, past mountains of road salt, mesas of scrap metal, moraines of rusted shipping containers. Just beyond the city limits, we skirt the outflow pipes of the Stickney plant, said to be the largest sewage operation in the world. From the deck of City Living, we can’t see the Stickney, but we can smell it. Conversation turns to the recent rains. These have overwhelmed the region’s water-treatment system, resulting in “combined sewer overflows,” or CSOs. There is speculation about what sort of “floatables” the CSOs have set adrift. Someone wonders if we’ll encounter any Chicago River whitefish, local slang for used condoms. We chug on. Eventually, the Sanitary and Ship Canal joins up with another canal, known as the Cal-Sag. At the meeting of the waters, there’s a V-shaped park, featuring picturesque waterfalls. Like just about everything else on our route, the waterfalls are manufactured.
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 human 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.
The canal, which was planned in the closing years of the nineteenth century and opened at the start of the twentieth, flipped the river on its head. It compelled the Chicago to change its direction, so that instead of draining into Lake Michigan, the city’s ordure would flow away from it, into the Des Plaines River, and from there into the Illinois, the Mississippi, and, ultimately, the Gulf of Mexico. Water in Chicago River Now Resembles Liquid, ran the headline in The New York Times.
The reversal of the Chicago was the biggest public-works project of its time, a textbook example of what used to be called, without irony, the control of nature. Excavating the canal took seven years and entailed the invention of a whole new suite of technologies—the Mason & Hoover Conveyor, the Heidenreich Incline—which, together, became known as the Chicago School of Earth Moving. In total, forty-three million cubic yards of rock and soil were gouged out, enough, one admiring commentator calculated, to build an island more than fifty feet high and a mile square. The river made the city, and the city remade the river.
But reversing the Chicago 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. It is toward these that City Living is cruising. We’re approaching cautiously, though maybe not cautiously enough, because at one point City Living almost gets squished between two double-wide barges. The deckhands yell down instructions that are initially incomprehensible, then become unprintable.
About thirty miles up the down river—or is it down the up river?—we draw near our goal. The first sign that we’re getting close is a sign. It’s the size of a billboard and the color of a plastic lemon. Warning, it says. No S
wimming, Diving, Fishing, or Mooring. Almost immediately there’s another sign, in white: Supervise All Passengers, Children, and Pets. Several hundred yards farther along, a third sign appears, maraschino red. Danger, it states. Entering Electric Fish Barriers. High Risk of Electric Shock.
Everyone pulls out a cell phone or a camera. We photograph the water, the warning signs, and each other. There’s joking on board that one of us should dive into the river electric, or at least stick a hand in to see what happens. Six great blue herons, hoping for an easy dinner, have gathered, wing to wing, on the bank, like students waiting on line in a cafeteria. We photograph them, too.
* * *
—
That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth,” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. Choose just about any metric you want and it tells the same story. People have, by now, directly transformed more than half the ice-free land on earth—some twenty-seven million square miles—and indirectly half of what remains. We have dammed or diverted most of the world’s major rivers. Our fertilizer plants and legume crops fix more nitrogen than all terrestrial ecosystems combined, and our planes, cars, and power stations emit about a hundred times more carbon dioxide than volcanoes do. We now routinely cause earthquakes. (A particularly damaging human-induced quake that shook Pawnee, Oklahoma, on the morning of September 3, 2016, was felt all the way in Des Moines.) In terms of sheer biomass, the numbers are stark-staring: today people outweigh wild mammals by a ratio of more than eight to one. Add in the weight of our domesticated animals—mostly cows and pigs—and that ratio climbs to twenty-two to one. “In fact,” as a recent paper in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences observed, “humans and livestock outweigh all vertebrates combined, with the exception of fish.” We have become the major driver of extinction and also, probably, of speciation. So pervasive is man’s impact, it is said that we live in a new geological epoch—the Anthropocene. In the age of man, there is nowhere to go, and this includes the deepest trenches of the oceans and the middle of the Antarctic ice sheet, that does not already bear our Friday-like footprints.
An obvious lesson to draw from this turn of events is: be careful what you wish for. Atmospheric warming, ocean warming, ocean acidification, sea-level rise, deglaciation, desertification, eutrophication—these are just some of the by-products of our species’s success. Such is the pace of what is blandly labeled “global change” that there are only a handful of comparable examples in earth’s history, the most recent being the asteroid impact that ended the reign of the dinosaurs, sixty-six million years ago. Humans are producing no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future. At this point it might be prudent to scale back our commitments and reduce our impacts. But there are so many of us—as of this writing nearly eight billion—and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable.
And so we face a no-analog predicament. If there is to be an answer to the problem of control, it’s going to be more control. Only now what’s got to be managed is not a nature that exists—or is imagined to exist—apart from the human. Instead, the new effort begins with a planet remade and spirals back on itself—not so much the control of nature as the control of the control of nature. First you reverse a river. Then you electrify it.
* * *
—
The United States Army Corps of Engineers has its Chicago District headquarters in a Classical Revival building on LaSalle Street. A plaque outside the building explains that it was the site of the General Time Convention of 1883, held to sync the country’s clocks. The process involved pruning dozens of regional time zones down to four, which, in many towns, resulted in what’s become known as the “day with two noons.”
Since its founding, under President Thomas Jefferson, the Corps has been dedicated to out-scaled interventions. Among the many world-altering undertakings it’s had a shovel in are: the Panama Canal, the St. Lawrence Seaway, the Bonneville Dam, and the Manhattan Project. (To build the atomic bomb, the Corps created a new division; it called this the Manhattan District to disguise the project’s true purpose.) It is a sign of the times that the Corps finds itself increasingly involved in backward-looping, second-order efforts, like managing the electric barriers on the Sanitary and Ship Canal.
One morning not long after my boat trip with the Friends, I visited the Corps’ Chicago office to talk with the engineer in charge of the barriers, Chuck Shea. The first thing I noticed on arriving was a pair of giant Asian carp, mounted on rocks, next to the reception desk. Like all Asian carp, they had eyes near the bottom of their heads, so it looked as if they’d been mounted upside down. In a curious commingling of fake fauna, the plastic fish were surrounded by little plastic butterflies.
“I never would have pictured when I was studying engineering years ago that I would spend so much time thinking about a fish,” Shea told me. “But, actually, it’s pretty good for party conversation.” Shea is a slight man with graying hair, wire-rimmed glasses, and the diffidence that comes from dealing with problems words can’t solve. I asked him how the barriers worked, and he stuck out his hand, as if to shake mine.
“We pulse electricity into the waterway,” he explained. “And basically you just have to transmit enough electricity to the water to ensure that you’re getting an electrical field throughout the area.
“The electric-field strength is increasing as you move from upstream to downstream or vice versa, so if my hand were a fish, its nose is here,” he continued, indicating the tip of his middle finger, “and its tail is here.” He pointed to the base of his palm, then set the outstretched hand wiggling.
“What happens is, the fish is swimming in, and its nose is experiencing one electrical voltage, and its tail is experiencing another. That’s what makes the current actually flow through the body. It’s the current flowing through a fish that will shock them or electrocute them. So a big fish has a big voltage difference from its nose to its tail. A smaller fish doesn’t have that much distance for the voltage to cover, so the shock is smaller.”
He sat back and dropped his hand into his lap. “The good news is that Asian carp are very big fish. They’re public enemy number one.” A person, I noted, is pretty big, too. “All people react differently to electricity,” Shea replied. “But the bottom line, unfortunately, is that it can be fatal.”
Shea told me the Corps had gotten into the barrier business in the late 1990s, thanks to a push from Congress. “It was a fairly open-ended directive,” he said. “ ‘Do something!’ ”
Before its reversal, the Chicago River flowed into Lake Michigan.
The Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal redirected the river away from the lake.
The task set for the Corps was a tricky one: to make the Sanitary and Ship Canal impassable for fish, without impeding the movement of people, their cargo, or their waste. The Corps considered more than a dozen possible approaches, including: dosing the canal with poison, irradiating it with ultraviolet light, zapping it with ozone, using power-plant effluent to heat the water, and installing giant filters. It even looked into loading the canal with nitrogen to create the sort of anoxic environment typically associated with raw sewage. (This last option was rejected in part owing to its cost—an estimated $250,000 a day.) Electrification won out because it was cheap and seemed the most humane option. Any fish approaching the barrier would, it was hoped, be repelled before it was actually killed.
The first electric barrier went live on April 9, 2002. The species it was originally supposed to repel was a frog-faced interloper called the round goby. The round goby is a native of the Caspian Sea and an aggressive consumer of other fishes’ eggs. It had established itself in Lake Michigan, and the fear was it would use the Sanitary and Ship Canal to swim out of the lake and into the Des Plaines River. From there, it could swim into the Illinois River and on to the
Mississippi. But, as Shea put it to me, “Before the project could be activated, the round goby was already on the other side.” It became a case of electrifying the canal after the fish had bolted.
Meanwhile, other invaders—Asian carp—were moving in the opposite direction, up the Mississippi, toward Chicago. If the carp got through the canal, they would, it was feared, wreak havoc in Lake Michigan, before moving on to wreak more havoc in Lakes Superior, Huron, Erie, and Ontario. One Michigan politician warned the fish could “ruin our way of life.”
“Asian carp are a very good invasive species,” Shea told me. Then he corrected himself: “Well, not ‘good’—they’re good at being invasive. They’re adaptable and they’re able to thrive in a lot of different environments. And that’s what makes them so difficult to deal with.”
The Corps later installed two additional barriers on the canal, which significantly upped the voltage, and, at the time of my visit, it was replacing the original barrier with a more powerful version. It was also planning to take the fight to a whole new level, by installing a barrier that featured loud noise and bubbles. The cost of the bubble barrier was first estimated at $275 million, then later rose to $775 million.
“People joke about it being a disco barrier,” Shea said. It was a line, it occurred to me, he might well have used at a party.
* * *
—
Though people often talk about Asian carp as if it were a single species, the term is a catchall for four fish. All four are native to China, where they’re referred to collectively as 四大家鱼, a phrase that translates into English roughly as the “four famous domestic fishes.” The Chinese raise the famous four together in ponds and have been doing so since the thirteenth century. The practice has been called “the first documented example of integrated polyculture in human history.”
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