Under a White Sky Summary and Analysis

Summary: Down the River: Part 1

Elizabeth Kolbert prefaces Under a White Sky with an epigraph by German-language author Franz Kafka (1883–1924), best known for his novella The Metamorphosis (1915). The text comes from a brief four-part essay of Kafka’s called “The Rescue Will Begin in Its Own Time.” The last part is about a prisoner watching his cellmate kill time while waiting to be rescued by drawing a hammer along the walls. The narrator notes, “the rescue will begin in its own time . . . but it [the hammer] remains something . . . a token.”

Under a White Sky is divided into three sections. Part 1, “Down the River,” treats two topics: managing fish populations in the Midwest and preserving land in Louisiana’s Mississippi River delta. Part 1, Chapter 1 begins with a look at the South Branch of the Chicago River and its Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal. The canal was created to reverse the flow of the Chicago River. Originally, the sewage-filled Chicago flowed into Lake Michigan, Chicago’s only source of drinking water. Through the canal, the river’s sewage instead flows into the Des Plaines River and on to the Gulf of Mexico. However, this unnatural reversing of the direction of the Chicago River had unforeseen consequences.

Kolbert lists the ways in which people have transformed “more than half the ice-free land on earth,” about 27 million square miles. These activities have earned the name for a new geological epoch, the Anthropocene, or age of man:

• damming and diverting major rivers
• fixing nitrogen via production of fertilizer and legume crops
• emitting carbon dioxide from plants, cars, and power stations
• shifting ratios of biomass so that people and domesticated livestock dominate other creatures by a ratio of 22 to 1
• becoming the major driver of extinction.

She adds a list of the results of those nature-defying activities: warming of the atmosphere and oceans, rise of the sea level, loss of glaciers, and more. The pace of these human changes are producing “no-analog climates, no-analog ecosystems, a whole no-analog future.” In other words, the natural world has changed so drastically that there is no past era to which these things can be compared.

Continuing her story, Kolbert explains how electric barriers were created on the Sanitary and Ship Canal by the US Army Corps of Engineers. She talks to Chuck Shea, the engineer in charge of the barriers. The corps, she learns from Shea, pulses electricity into the waterway in order to repel invasive species of fish, such as the four species of Asian carp. They were brought from Asia to America at a time when non-native species were seen as the solution to controlling native pests. Introduced to keep weeds under control and filter algae in various waterways, the fish quickly escaped and began to compete against native fish and eat freshwater mussels. The corps was also planning to add a barrier with loud noise and bubbles. Another strategy, meant to keep the carp from even reaching the barriers, is to hire fishers to net the fish and leave them to die on their boats. The dead fish are then sold for use as fertilizer.

Kolbert then turns to her second water topic: the drainage basin of the Mississippi River. The basin is the third largest in the world, after those of the Amazon and Congo Rivers. More than 1.2 million square miles long, it covers 31 states and parts of two provinces in Canada. She compares the drainage basin to that of the Great Lakes, which covers more than 300,000 square miles and holds 80% of the fresh surface water in North America. In nature, the two “great basins” are completely unrelated, but the creation of Chicago’s Sanitary and Ship Canal connected them.

Experts began thinking of plans to keep invasive species from slipping from one basin into the other. Plugging the canal was not an option, as it would require rerouting the city’s boat traffic and changing its systems for flood control and sewage treatment. In addition to the electric barriers and the planned noise and bubbles, a strategy to attract carp to the fishers’ nets using bait is being tested as Kolbert visits the fishers doing barrier defense.

In Part 1, Chapter 2, Kolbert travels to Louisiana to explore the impact of human activity on the Mississippi Basin. She first flies over Louisiana’s Lake Pontchartrain, then follows the Mississippi River to Plaquemines Parish (the regional designation of “parish” is similar to a county) at Louisiana’s southeasternmost tip. Plaquemines is one of the fastest-disappearing places on earth as water covers its land. The author points out that Louisiana has shrunk “by more than two thousand square miles” since the 1930s. This “land-loss crisis” is the result of the thousands of miles of levees and flood walls built by the US Army Corps of Engineers to keep southern Louisiana dry. The system has had the opposite effect, however, as Kolbert will go on to explain. She observes, “If control is the problem, then, by the logic of the Anthropocene, still more control must be the solution.”

Plaquemines is made up of layers of sand and clay deposited over millions of years by the Mississippi River. The most dramatic of these deposits, called “avulsions,” create large lobes of land, including those on which New Orleans and Plaquemines Parish sit.

Kolbert discusses how humans have dealt with flooding when the Mississippi River rises. The French who settled New Orleans raised levees, or artificial walls, along the river to hold back its waters. Each time the river overflowed, the levees were fortified. She observes the location of the existing levees, along with a spillway that opens to divert river water into Lake Pontchartrain, in a model of the delta. The model clearly shows Kolbert Louisiana’s land-loss dilemma. Before there were levees and spillways, an overflowing river would have spread new sand and clay across the land, forming a fresh layer of soil. Now, however, there is no such spread of soil.

Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority (CPRA) was founded in 2005 after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans and left over 1,800 people dead. Kolbert goes with two CPRA engineers to Plaquemines Parish, where much of the land lies below sea level thanks to four sets of levees. The engineers point out one of their accomplishments, an artificial marsh called BA-39 constructed from soils pumped out of the bottom of the river. CPRA plans dozens more such projects, each costing millions of dollars. But, Kolbert points out, to stay even with the natural land loss the state would have to create a new BA-39 every nine days. Furthermore, the marsh has already begun to sink.

One of the engineers makes a presentation to local residents about the region’s geology and CPRA’s actions. Its long-term plan is to create multiple giant holes in the levees and the Mississippi River’s main branch, the Atchafalaya, to reestablish the sediment deposits. The first such hole will have a channel 600 feet wide by 30 feet deep and will be lined with concrete at a cost of $1.4 billion. The next one will cost $800 million. Funding will come from the settlement fund from the disastrous BP oil spill in 2010. One of the locals points out that the diversion will affect local fishing. “When we as humans intervene, it rarely turns out well,” he says.

Back in New Orleans, Kolbert meets with a coastal geologist named Alex Kolker. A teacher at the Louisiana Universities Marine Consortium, Kolker bikes with the author around the city. It is sinking by almost half a foot a decade, one of the fastest rates on Earth. Kolker points out evidence of this sinking, ranging from patched potholes to water pumping stations. He tells Kolbert how Hurricane Katrina devastated the city by driving water into channels meant for shipping. As levees on the canals failed, walls of water surged into low-lying neighborhoods. Overflow from Lake Pontchartrain was also forced into the canals, causing more floodwalls to give way. While some experts suggested rebuilding only the highest areas of the city, the idea was unpopular. The US Army Corps of Engineers was again given the task of reinforcing the levees. It also created a concrete surge barrier, a rock dam, and gates and pumps between the drainage canals and Lake Pontchartrain. Yet New Orleans continues to lose land.

Kolbert goes on to discuss the fate of Isle de Jean Charles, which lies 50 miles southwest of New Orleans. Most of the residents are Native American. Their 40 remaining homes stand on tall pilings. In one resident’s lifetime, the island has shrunk from 35 square miles to half a square mile. Its soil was lost to flood-control measures, and canals built for the oil industry killed off local reeds and marsh grasses, widening the canals. Kolbert thinks of the unfairness in play as the Native residents had no say in the projects that destroyed most of their island.

The last topic in Part 1, Chapter 2 is the Old River Control Auxiliary Structure that sits about 80 miles upriver of Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Built by the US Army Corps of Engineers, it maintains the flow of water from the Mississippi into the Atchafalaya River via two large, gated channels. Kolbert visits the structure and talks with a resource specialist who describes how each day, engineers measure the flow on the Red and Mississippi Rivers and then adjust the gates to control the force of the water flow in defiance of its natural pattern. Kolbert concludes by saying the Louisiana delta is now a CHANS—a “coupled human and natural system.”

Analysis: Down the River: Part 1

In the context of her topic, Elizabeth Kolbert’s epigraph by Kafka refers to the desperation of scientists who will try any solution, no matter how far-fetched, to solve problems caused when humans act in ways that are contrary to nature. That these solutions often create more problems is a main idea of Part 1 and the book as a whole.

Kolbert stresses in Part 1 the multiple cases of situational irony created as humans look to technology to reverse the enormous impact they have made on America’s lakes and rivers. One irony is that the idea to introduce non-native species to control native pests stems from the book Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1907–1964). Published in 1962, Carson’s groundbreaking documentation of the effect of the pesticide DDT on the health of animals and humans led to the creation of the US Environmental Protection Agency. Carson did not foresee the enormous trouble that introduced species, like the Asian carp, could cause—or the equally enormous efforts to which US agencies would go to control them. Another irony is that the very levees and floodwalls built to contain the Mississippi River in Louisiana are causing the land to rapidly shrink. By holding back the river’s floodwaters, the human structures prevent the spread of soil that would replenish the shrinking supply of land in areas such as Plaquemines Parish.

Part 1 also shows the futile tasks assigned to agencies including the US Army Corps of Engineers as they try to mitigate the effects of human control over America’s waterways. The corps has been given the nearly absurd task of creating electric barriers in the Chicago Sanitary and Ship Canal to repel invasive fish and adding noises and bubbles to reinforce the work of the barriers. It was the corps that created the levees and walls meant to keep southern Louisiana dry, and after Hurricane Katrina, the corps again had to reinforce the levees and create more water controls even as New Orleans continued to lose land. In addition, the corps built the Old River Control that, as Kolbert points out, turned the Louisiana delta into a geological feature that is part-nature and part-human. This is another of Kolbert’s main ideas: in the “nature of the future,” natural species and ecosystems will be hopelessly enmeshed in human activity. The task of the Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority in Louisiana is also essentially futile. It builds up areas of land at great expense but cannot outpace the natural land loss.