Science writer Elizabeth Kolbert won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, in which she presented her groundbreaking argument that the planet is undergoing a prolonged man-made mass extinction. In Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Kolbert acknowledges the damage we’ve done and looks to the people—biologists working on preservation efforts, researchers engineering coral that can survive at hotter temperatures, among others— working to save what we can, in the hopes of creating our best possible future.