Under a White Sky Major Figures

Elizabeth Kolbert

As the narrator of Under a White Sky, environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert (born 1961) is also its most important figure. An authority on her topic, Kolbert is an active participant in her own reporting. She filters the information she gains by conducting interviews and research through her own understanding of environmental science and its history.

Chuck Shea

Chuck Shea is the engineer in charge of the electric barriers on the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. He is described as having the diffidence that “comes from dealing with problems words can’t solve.” In Part 1, Shea explains to Kolbert the strategy for the barriers and how they work.

Alex Kolker

Alex Kolker, a coastal geologist, teaches at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium. He gives city tours via bike that emphasize hydrology, the science concerned with the properties of water. It is Kolker who explains to Kolbert in Part 1 how 2005’s Hurricane Katrina was able to destroy much of New Orleans and what is being done to prevent more devastating floods in the future.

William Lewis Manly

William Lewis Manly (1820–1903) is the writer who in 1849 saved a group of would-be gold miners as they followed a trail through Death Valley in southern Nevada. He wrote about his experiences in a book first titled From Vermont to California, published in 1886. Kolbert describes his first view of the desert at the beginning of Part 2 of Under a White Sky.

Kevin Wilson

Kevin Wilson is the National Park Service ecologist in Part 2 who oversees the count of pupfish in Nevada’s Devils Hole cavern, located within what is now Death Valley National Park. He has spent most of his life working with the pupfish that live in the cavern.

Ruth Gates

Ruth Gates (1962–2018) was a marine biologist who dedicated her career to saving coral reefs. Part 2 describes her research, which focused on the relationship between coral and algae. She studied ways to breed corals so they can survive environmental stress, particularly rising ocean temperatures.

Mark Tizard

Mark Tizard is the biochemist in charge of the research project at the Australian Animal Health Laboratory that Kolbert investigates in Part 2. The researchers are attempting to edit the genome of a giant pest called the cane toad by manipulating its DNA. 

Edda Aradóttir

Edda Aradóttir is a managing director at Reykjavik Energy, which owns the power station that Kolbert visits in Part 3. She is one of the people who does calculations suggesting that CO₂ captured and injected into the earth would interact with volcanic rock and be stored as rock.

Klaus Lackner

Klaus Lackner is the German-born physicist who developed the idea of negative emissions, that is, a process that would remove carbon dioxide from the air and store it as calcium carbonate. Lackner went on to found the Center for Negative Carbon Emissions at Arizona State University in 2014, which Kolbert visits along with Lackner in Part 3.

Jan Wurzbacher

Jan Wurzbacher cofounded Climeworks, the company that Kolbert pays to bury carbon dioxide emissions in Part 3. He is in his mid-thirties when Kolbert meets him at the headquarters of Climeworks in Zurich. He tells Kolbert some of the downsides to capturing CO₂ from the atmosphere, including the expense.

Frank Keutsch

Frank Keutsch is a chemist with Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program. Kolbert interviews him in Part 3 to discuss how solar geoengineering works. He is working on projects aimed at throwing reflective particles into the air in order to cool the world in the same way volcanic matter does.

David Keith

David Keith, a professor of applied physics at Harvard University, is interviewed by Kolbert in Part 3. He is a strong supporter of geoengineering and founded Harvard’s Solar Geoengineering Research Program in 2017. He is also the founder of a company called Carbon Engineering, which performs direct air capture.

Dan Schrag

Dan Schrag directs the Harvard University Center for the Environment and helped to create the university’s geoengineering program. When Kolbert interviews Schrag in Part 3, he tells her that engineering the climate might be the “best chance for survival” for most of the ecosystems on Earth.