![]() ![]() ![]() It’s as if we’re living through an enormous trolley problem: Do nothing, and the runaway trolley will kill billions of people or pull the lever and shunt the trolley to another track, where it will kill millions. Leaving the natural world to repair itself isn’t an option anymore - or, at least, it’s not an acceptable one, considering the death and suffering that would inevitably ensue. According to Elizabeth Kolbert’s new book, “Under a White Sky,” how we proceed is, in one sense, full of possibility, a test of our technological ingenuity and derring-do, but it also happens to be grimly determined in one irrevocable way. The term refers to how humans have been so successful at changing the environment that we have become the dominant influence on the natural world. ![]() My spell-check program doesn’t recognize the word “Anthropocene,” underlining it in red, as if it’s a typo to be cleaned up and not a geological epoch to be grappled with. ![]()
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