Afternoon Coffee Book Club

Join the Afternoon Coffee Book Club (formerly the Morning Coffee Book Club) where Scott Biegen, a PSPL Librarian (and English Teacher in a previous life), leads a book club meeting on Zoom. For Summer 2021, we will read three current nonfiction books.

The group meets the 3rd Wednesday of the month on Zoom from 2:00 p.m.-3:30 p.m. (PST). To receive meeting information and join the email list for the Afternoon Coffee Book Club, please email Scott Biegen in advance of the meeting at scott.biegen@palmspringsca.gov

Click here to see other selections for the Afternoon Coffee Book Club.

 July 21, 2021

Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future by Elizabeth Kolbert

—National Bestseller from the Pulitzer Prize Winner for The Sixth Extinction
 
That man should have dominion “over all the earth, and over every creeping thing that creepeth upon the earth” is a prophecy that has hardened into fact. So pervasive are human impacts on the planet that it’s said we live in a new geological epoch: the Anthropocene.
 
In Under a White Sky, Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Along the way, she meets biologists who are trying to preserve the world's rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the middle of the Mojave; engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers who are trying to develop a "super coral" that can survive on a hotter globe; and physicists who are contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.

One way to look at human civilization, says Kolbert, is as a ten-thousand-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.

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Anyone who requires an auxiliary aid or service for effective communication, or a modification of policies or procedures to participate in a program, service, or activity of the City of Palm Springs, should contact the ADA Coordinator, as soon as possible but no later than 48 hours before the scheduled event.