Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky

 

Elizabeth Kolbert's Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future

Humans add Asian carp to our environment (for the excellent purpose of controlling pests without chemicals), then need to create extraordinarily elaborate and costly systems to fight that carp and keep them from further devastating the environment.  They dam the Mississippi and then work endlessly to mitigate the harm that causes. Under a White Sky is the tale of human hubris in the "After Nature" world -- first creating environmental disaster, then trying (hubristically) to fix it.  The book includes tales of humans creating artificial eco-systems in air-plan hangar-sized buildings in Death Valley to save a pupfish which human activities endangered and tales of re-creation of indoor coral farms to "assist evolution."  

Here's one of my favorite sections of the writing shows how our language reflects our very complicated relationship to nature:

It's often observed that nature -- or at least the concept of it -- is tangled up in culture.  Until there was something that could be set against it -- technology, art, consciousness -- there was only "nature," and so no real use for the category.  It's also probalby true that by the time "nature" was invented, culture was already enmeshed in it. Twenty thousand years ago, wolves were domesticated.  The result was a new speciid (or, by some accounts, sub-species) as well as two new cateogoreies: the "tame" and the "wild." With the domestication of wheat, around ten thousand years ago, the plant world split.  Some plants became "crops" and others "weeds." In the brave new world of the Antrhopocene, the divisions keep multiplying.

Consider the "synanthrope." This is an animal that has not been domesticated and yet, for whatever reason, turn out to be peculiarly well suited to life on a farm in the big city.  Synanthropes (from the Greek syn for "together," and anthropos, "man") include racoons, American cros, Norway rats, Asian carp, house mice, and a couple of dozen species of cockroach.  Coyotes profit from hman disturbance but skirt areas dense with hyman acitivty; they have been dubbed "misanthropic synanthropes." In botan, "apophytes" are native plants that thrive when people move in; "anthropophytes" are planst that thrive when people move them around.  Anthropophytes can be still further subdivided into "archaeophytes," which were spread before Euroeans arrived in the New World, and "kenophytes," which were spread afterward.

Of course, for every species that has prospered with humans, many more have declined, creating the need for another, bleaker list of terms....(82)

Kolbert goes on to name the wide variety of terms we've need to come up with to represent endangeredness.  She goes on to say that one way we could have made sense of the "biodiversity crisis" is to accept it.  Another is to try to change it.  "And so we've created another class of animals.  These are creatures we've pushed to the edge and then yanked back.  The term of art for such creatures is "conservation-reliant," though they might also be called "Stockholm species" for their utter dependence on their perssectors." (84)