Inquiring Minds

This summer we will read Elizabeth Kolbert’s book Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, published in 2021 (ISBN: 9780593136294).

From the Amazon webpage: “One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a 10,000-year exercise in defying nature. In The Sixth Extinction, she explored the ways in which our capacity for destruction has reshaped the natural world. Now she examines how the very sorts of interventions that have imperiled our planet are increasingly seen as the only hope for its salvation. By turns inspiring, terrifying, and darkly comic, Under a White Sky is an utterly original examination of the challenges we face.”
Elizabeth Kolbert is a journalist, author, staff writer for The New Yorker and a visiting fellow at Williams College. She studied literature at Yale University and was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Hamburg in Germany.
These are the reading assignments:

July 11: Down the River: Chapters 1–2
July 25: Into the Wild: Chapters 1–2
August 8: Into the Wild: Chapter 3; Up in the Air: Chapter 1
August 22: Up in the Air: Chapters 2–3

Facilitator: Maria Penny retired from two careers, as a high-school physics teacher and as a scientific programmer. She earned a BA in physics from New York University and a PhD in science education from the University of Maryland.
 

Presenter Biography