StateImpact Pennsylvania invites public to discuss ‘nature of the future’ with author Elizabeth Kolbert

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StateImpact Pennsylvania, WITF and Midtown Scholar Bookstore invite you to a free, virtual discussion with author Elizabeth Kolbert on her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future. The event is Monday, May 24 at 6 p.m.

Join the conversation with Kolbert and StateImpact Pennsylvania reporter Rachel McDevitt. Learn more and RSVP here.

About the book:

According to the publisher, Under a White Sky takes a hard look at human impacts on the planet during what’s unofficially referred to as a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene. Along the way, Kolbert meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.

One way to look at human civilization, Kolbert says, is as a 10,000-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation.

About the author:

Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize. For her work at The New Yorker, where she’s a staff writer, she has received two National Magazine Awards and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

 

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