Under A White Sky: The Nature Of The Future Quotes
"Rivers make good metaphors—too good, perhaps. They can signify destiny, or coming into knowledge, or coming upon that which one would rather not know."
"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."
"But there are so many of us—as of this writing nearly eight billion—and we are stepped in so far, return seems impracticable."
"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."
"In the age of man, there is nowhere to go that does not already bear our Friday-like footprints."
"The Mississippi River was controlled; land was lost; the environment changed."
"I woke up this mornin’, can’t even get out of my door."
"The city once known as L’Isle de la Nouvelle Orléans would, in coming years, look more and more like an island."
"Man every day is surpassing Nature. He has thrown back the giant Mississippi and made it go where it listeth not."
"Everything about the crime—the piscine necropsy, the county jail’s worth of security, the little fish marooned in the middle of the Mojave—intrigued me."
"Pupfish counts are conducted four times a year at Devils Hole."
"It’s often observed that nature—or at least the concept of it—is tangled up in culture."
"In the twentieth century, the biodiversity crisis, as it eventually came to be known, only sped up."
"Is it not a maimed and imperfect nature that I am conversant with?"
"The conditions of high temperature and low oxygen should be fatal."
"A species qualifies as "endangered" when its numbers have declined by more than fifty percent over a decade or three generations."
"The history of life has, after all, been punctuated by extinction events, both big and very, very big."
"People could either "assist" corals in coping with the change they’d brought about, or they could watch them die."
"But for whatever reason—call it biophilia, call it care for God’s creation, call it heart-stopping fear—people are reluctant to be the asteroid."
"The strongest argument for gene editing cane toads, house mice, and ship rats is also the simplest: what’s the alternative?"
"Rejecting such technologies as unnatural isn’t going to bring nature back."
"In a world of synthetic gene drives, the border between the human and the natural, between the laboratory and the wild, already deeply blurred, all but dissolves."
"We are as gods and might as well get good at it."
"The issue, at this point, is not whether we’re going to alter nature, but to what end?"
"With a synthetic gene drive, the normal rules of heredity are overridden and an altered gene spreads quickly."
"If CRISPR confers the power to 'rewrite the very molecules of life,' with a synthetic gene drive, that power increases exponentially."
"Sometimes doing nothing is better than doing something. Sometimes it is the other way around."
"The ability to 'rewrite the very molecules of life' places us, it could be argued, under an obligation."
"The real world of climate change is that we’re up against it."
"People have to get their heads away from thinking about whether they like solar geoengineering or not, whether they think it should be done or not. They have to understand that we don’t get to decide."
"To be clear, I’m not saying that modifications mostly do work. I’m saying it’s a wide, undefined set."
"To combat rising sea levels and the more deadly storm surges that they bring, the Army Corps of Engineers has proposed building a series of artificial islands in New York Harbor."
"If the world does nothing, ice sheets will keep shrinking and the losses will accelerate."
"The electric fish barriers, the concrete crevasse, the fake cavern, the synthetic clouds—these were presented to me less in a spirit of techno-optimism than what might be called techno-fatalism."
"Geoengineering may be 'entirely crazy and quite disconcerting,' but if it could slow the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, doesn't it have to be considered?"
"We live in a world where deliberately dimming the fucking sun might be less risky than not doing it."
"Scientists can only make recommendations; implementation is a political decision."
"This has been a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems."
"It’s in this context that interventions like assisted evolution and gene drives have to be assessed."
"The world—or just a small group of assertive nations—launched a fleet of SAILs, global emissions continue to rise."
"The result would be an unprecedented climate for an unprecedented world, where silver carp glisten under a white sky."