I read the first 3 chapters and thought to myself, "This should be a Netflix series." And so I sent Elizabeth Kolbert a message on Twitter, and she responded! Exciting!
That's besides the point, which is that this book is one the examines a small handful of very interesting topics, and Kolbert intertwines their relevance back to the impacts of climate change and man's defiance of nature. Take a singular natural occurrence, understand it's evolution over time - how's it changed / adapted / grown / shrunk / morphed - and you'll find that we've unknowingly and unconsciously altered that instance's course of existence. And then once we've learned that we've altered it, we try to reverse engineer the process to revert it back to old - what we think it should have been.
As humans, we've become skilled at deviating a natural path, trying to course-correct it, but impacting other natural processes simultaneously. All this to say that while we think we can control the uncontrollable, the only thing we're really doing is harming ourselves in the process.
Kolbert makes it so easy to visualize and comprehend that these seemingly inconsequential issues are just a sampling of the global damage occurring on a daily basis, some with a butterfly effect.