It’s a difficult form of nonfiction writing, and she is a master of it,” said McKay Jenkins, UD Cornelius Tilghman Professor of English, Journalism and Environmental Humanities.ĭana Veron, an associate professor of geography and spatial sciences, said that Under a White Sky makes a natural choice for this year’s Common Reader. “As a staff writer at The New Yorker, where some of this material first appeared, Kolbert is highly adept at turning complex science into accessible and compelling narrative storytelling. But Kolbert makes one thing certain - there’s no going back now. With a whole lot of imagination, finding fixes for the climate crisis might work. What she finds could be called a grand display of human hubris: engineers, scientists and entrepreneurs all trapped in an infinite cycle of inventing new solutions to the problems created by old ones. That’s the irony Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert investigates in the 2021 Common Reader, Under a White Sky.Ī UD tradition administered by the First Year Seminar Program, the Common Reader provides first-year undergraduates an opportunity to engage in meaningful conversation with fellow students and to begin to share in the intellectual life of the entire University community.Ī search for answers sends Kolbert packing, from Moku o Loʻe to the Mojave Desert to Melbourne and more than a few other places in between. Now, after all that human innovation has done to destroy the planet, could we also be its only hope of survival? Even still, many people say that our species has so extensively controlled the environment that we require our own geological epoch - the Anthropocene or “Age of Man.” In comparison to earth’s 4.6 billion year existence, humanity’s approximately 300,000 year history is a mere blink.

Under a white sky elizabeth kolbert