I am not okay with spewing things into the air that may change the colour of the sky to white just because the species I am part of has already spewed so much crap into the atmosphere that the climates we’ve taken for granted as life-supporting are changing in ways that will make fewer locations capable of hosting our ungrateful asses. I am especially against this decision ever being made to attempt this techie “fix” because it wouldn’t actually “fix” anything, only possibly buy a little more time for some while possibly exacerbating problems for many others. Those “others” most likely being those who have already suffered most in the Anthropocene – our non-human relatives and the homo sapiens who saw most or all of their former ways of life beaten out by the various imperialistic/colonizing forces of Europe, the USA, and all the predations of economic systems that reward only the most ruthless in any group of humans.

The author is best known for her earlier book, The Sixth Extinction, a book I’m loath to read as the only thing that truly makes me sad when considering planetary destruction is our ongoing murder of all of our non-human, non-domesticated relatives. Their extinctions happen mostly because the real effort required to protect them would mess with our money. Money is what we’ve been made to rely on more than clean air & water because the inability to access whatever monetary units change hands in whichever nation we reside will render a person unable to access anything except outdoor air, which is usually polluted anyway.

But there are still (too) many who want to think that we can science our way out of this mess we’ve made. That we can create artificial carbon capture methods that will somehow work better than the billions of trees we’ve consumed in order to make the land more amendable to agriculture, to get the lumber needed to build more structures for more humans who can afford the costs to live in them, to pulp the paper so we could publish the good news of our domination over Nature and still have enough to flush away in our water wasting toilets. Why, yes, I am a little bitter – what makes you ask?

As a kid, I remember reading about examples of humans overcoming a Natural barrier to what they wanted (cheap food, easily navigated rivers, more power – electrical & otherwise) and subsequently creating another problem via their disruption of the existing ecosystems. They would then try to “fix” the man made problem, not by stopping or undoing what they’d done and accepting that what they wanted was not what they should have, but by introducing a new layer of problem into the mix. Examples would be cane toads, the Dust Bowl, Galveston’s sand bar … At some point, one would think that we would realize that constant growth, constant expansion, constant consuming is not something we can continue to indulge in and instead start figuring out ways to slow down & redirect our efforts into making sure that everyone has enough while learning that having more of everything is no longer a given.

But, no. The people and places the author visits are just more of the same – people trying to figure out how to use science and tech to keep Nature from killing us without our having to actually change anything about the way we’ve been doing things. My absolute favourite book this year has a word for those of us currently avoiding doing the things that would actually address the actual problem (dismantling financial systems, stopping all non-essential “work”, allowing exploited peoples to decolonize & develop & teach the ways of living with their lands that aren’t based in constant extraction, oh and learning how to limit human population in order that non-human kin can have a chance to heal). That word is “fuckwits”.

Because Ms Kolbert finds no real hope in the places she visits for this book, many will bypass it, much as they might bypass last year’s Farewell to Ice or the latest news reports on ocean temperatures, glacial melt, or microplastics being found in all of the planet’s surface water, including rain. Ms Kolbert delivers the bad news so gently, however, it really doesn’t hurt, especially if it’s not news but just more examples of how, although humans are busy doing something, they’re mostly not doing anything helpful.