Elizabeth Kolbert—biography
Born on July 6, 1961, Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist, author, and visiting fellow at Williams College.
She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book (2015) The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and as an observer and commentator on the environment for The New Yorker.
A New York Times bestseller, The Sixth Extinction also won the Los Angeles Times' book prize for science and technology.
Her book Under a White Sky was one of The Washington Post's ten best books of 2021.
She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner, and in 2022 was awarded the BBVA Biophilia Award for Environmental Communication.
Her work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Essays.
Elizabeth Kolbert—biography
Kolbert spent her early childhood in the Bronx; her family then relocated to Larchmont, where she remained until 1979.
After high school, she attended Yale University and spent four years studying literature. In 1983, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Universität Hamburg, in Germany. Her brother, Dan Kolbert of Portland, Maine, is a well-known builder and author.
She started working for The New York Times as a stringer in Germany in 1983. In 1985, she went to work for the Metro desk. Kolbert served as the Times' Albany bureau chief from 1988 to 1991 and wrote the Metro Matters column from 1997 to 1998.
Since 1999, she has been a staff writer for The New Yorker.
Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and three sons, and serves as a visiting fellow at the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams College. She continues to write for The New Yorker and contributes to Yale Environment 360.
Publications
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006, reissued 2015)): Amazon blurb:
Elizabeth Kolbert's environmental classic Field Notes from a Catastrophe first developed out of a groundbreaking, National Magazine Award-winning three-part series in The New Yorker. She expanded it into a still-concise yet richly researched and damning book about climate change: a primer on the greatest challenge facing the world today.
But in the years since, the story has continued to develop; the situation has become more dire, even as our understanding grows. Now, Kolbert returns to the defining book of her career. She has added a chapter bringing things up-to-date on the existing text, plus three new chapters--on ocean acidification, the tar sands, and a Danish town that's gone carbon neutral--making it, again, a must-read for our moment.
NOTE: this book had a political point as well—what nations should be doing about it.
Publications
Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (2021): Examined human attempts to control or correct the damage done to the natural world.
Amazon blurb:
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, Kolbert takes a hard look at this new world. Along the way, she meets biologists trying to preserve the world’s rarest fish, which lives in a single tiny pool in the Mojave; engineers turning carbon emissions to stone in Iceland; Australian researchers trying to develop a “super coral” that can survive a hotter globe; and physicists contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth.
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 how 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.
Publications
Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World
Amazon blurb:
A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world. Collected in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking essays.
An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific ideas, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that’s succeeded in going carbon neutral, to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways, to the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting in a way that has implications for everyone. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who’s considered the "father of global warming," amongst other scientists at the forefront of environmental protection.
The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.
Publications
H is for Hope, Elizabeth Kolbert
Amazon:
In twenty-six essays—one for each letter of the alphabet—the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction takes us on a hauntingly illustrated journey through the history of climate change and the uncertainties of our future.
Climate change resists narrative—and yet some account of what’s happening is needed. Millions of lives are at stake, and upward of a million species. And there are decisions to be made, even though it’s unclear who, exactly, will make them.
In H Is for Hope, Elizabeth Kolbert investigates the landscape of climate change—from “A,” for Svante Arrhenius, who created the world’s first climate model in 1894, to “Z,” for the Colorado River Basin, ground zero for climate change in the US. Along the way she looks at Greta Thunburg’s “blah blah blah” speech (“B”), learns to fly an all-electric plane (“E”), experiments with the effects of extreme temperatures on the human body (“T”), and struggles with the deep uncertainty of the future of climate change (“U”).
Adapted from essays originally published in The New Yorker and beautifully illustrated by Wesley Allsbrook, H Is for Hope is simultaneously inspiring, alarming, and darkly humorous.
Chapters
Chapter 1 discusses the plight of the Panamanian golden frog. Although plentiful a decade ago, the frogs started to disappear a couple of years ago. They're now being kept alive in a "hotel" because of a fungus Chytrid fungus. While they can survive various threats in their native environment, this fungus is an invader, introduced by humans. She introduces a theme for the book in this first chapter: even the most dedicated, passionate scientists and conservationists cannot simply undo changes to complex ecosystems.
Chapter 2, The Mastodon's Molars, introduces Georges Cuvier, who suggested the idea of catastrophes as explanation for the extinction of some creatures, like the Mastodon. He identified the fossils of a creature, not as the remains of one known on earth, but as an extinct species. He identified catastrophes as a cause for extinction.
Cuvier and Extinction defined
From The History of Evolutionary Thought, UC Berkeley
Georges Cuvier (1769-1832) joined the fledgling National Museum in Paris in 1795, and quickly became the world’s leading expert on the anatomy of animals. He then used that knowledge to interpret fossils with unprecedented insight. Legend has it that sometimes even a few fragments of bones were enough for him to reconstruct the complete anatomy of a previously unknown species with uncanny accuracy.
A few earlier naturalists had argued that species might become extinct. But for some people in Cuvier’s day, the idea of extinction was religiously troubling. If God had created all of nature according to a divine plan at the beginning of the world, it would seem irrational for Him to let some parts of that creation die off. If life consisted of a Great Chain of Being, extending from ocean slime to humans to angels, extinctions would remove some of its links.
Cuvier and Extinction Defined
From The History of Evolutionary Thought, UC Berkeley
Cuvier carefully studied elephant fossils found near Paris. He discovered that their bones were indisputably distinct from those of living elephants in Africa and India. They were distinct even from fossil elephants in Siberia. Cuvier scoffed at the idea that living members of these fossil species were lurking somewhere on Earth, unrecognized—they were simply too big. Instead, Cuvier declared that they were separate species that had vanished. He later studied many other big mammal fossils and demonstrated that they too did not belong to any species alive today. The fossil evidence led him to propose that periodically the Earth went through sudden changes, each of which could wipe out a number of species.
Cuvier established extinctions as a fact that any future scientific theory of life had to explain. In Darwin‘s theory, species that did not adapt to changing environments or withstand the competition of other species faced annihilation. Darwin did not, however, accept all of Cuvier’s ideas on extinctions. Like Charles Lyell before him, he doubted that species went extinct in great “catastrophes.” Just as the planet’s geology changed gradually, so did its species become extinct gradually as new species were formed.
Cuvier and Extinction Defined
From The History of Evolutionary Thought, UC Berkeley
On this score, Cuvier has been somewhat vindicated. Perhaps 99% of all species that ever existed on Earth are now extinct. Most of those extinct species disappeared in a Darwinian trickle—what paleontologists call “background extinctions.” But several times over the past 600 million years, life has experienced “mass extinctions”, in which half or more of all species alive at the time disappeared in fewer than two million years—a blink of a geological eye. The causes may include asteroids, volcanoes, or relatively fast changes in sea level. These extinctions mark some of the great transitions in life, when new groups of species got the opportunity to take over the niches of old ones. Mammals, for example, only dominated the land after giant dinosaurs vanished 65 million years ago in the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction. We humans, in other words, are the children of extinctions.
Chapters
Chapter 3, The Original Penguin, introduces the great auk, a flightless bird with an intricately grooved beak, that lived in the northern hemisphere, Iceland, with a probable population of millions. But the settlers found them an appropriate food stuff, used their oily bodies for fuel and fish bait, even stuffed their mattresses with the feathers. Although there were attempts at protection, by 1844, they were extinct, an example of over exploitation by humans as a cause for extinction. Kolbert also introduces Darwin and Charles Lyell, from whom Darwin developed his ideas about evolution.
Chapters
Chapter 4, The Luck of the Ammonites, a type of mollusk, explains how they became the secondary victims of the great asteroid strike that killed the non-avian dinosaurs. It wasn't the impact itself but the dust and debris that incinerated everything in its path. We don't know all of the animals killed by this event, but we do know the ammonites perished because it dramatically, suddenly changed their environment. Kolbert explains that this shows that “in times of extreme stress, the whole concept of fitness, at least in a Darwinian sense, loses its meaning.” Evolution cannot keep up with abrupt environmental changes.
In Chapter 5, Welcome to the Anthropocene, Kolbert explains the human impact on the environment, specifically water--oceans and rivers—by altering their chemistry. As Kolbert explains, humans have transformed between a third and a half of the earth's land surfaces. We have damned, polluted, and "buried" rivers, used more than half of earth's fresh water run-off, removed more than one third of the primary producers of ocean coastal waters, and changed the composition of the atmosphere by deforestation and fossil-fuel consumption.
Chapters
Chapter 6, The Sea Around Us, continues the discussion of the previous chapter. Since the Industrial Revolution, levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere have increased at an alarming rate, 6% annually, to a level higher than it has been in the last several million years. This lowers the pH of the ocean and kills much of marine life. She cites Castello Aragonese as a warning sign of what's to come if we continue to increase CO2 levels.
Castello Aragonese (Castle Aragon)
The Castello Aragonese area serves as a natural laboratory for studying ocean acidification (OA), where volcanic CO2 vents lower the local seawater pH, impacting marine ecosystems. Environmental effects include reduced calcifying organisms, shifts in community structure, and stress on marine life, offering a proxy to predict future OA impacts on global marine biodiversity.
Areas with higher CO2 emissions show a significant reduction in the variety of marine species, both plants and animals.
Calcifying species, such as mollusks and corals, are particularly vulnerable and are negatively affected by the low pH, leading to declines in their populations. .
The low-pH environments lead to changes in the composition of marine communities, with some resilient species becoming dominant and others disappearing.
Marine organisms, especially those with shells or skeletons, face challenges like reduced calcification rates and potential oxidative stress.
Chapters
Chapter 7, Dropping Acid, explains that ocean acidification is a mechanism of extinction, particularly for coral reefs and the species that depend on them. As explained earlier, increased percentages of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere acidify the oceans as it rains. Extra energy will be required for calcification, but this extra energy is vital to corals as they recover from being eaten by marine species and battered by waves.
Chapter 8, The Forest and the Trees, explains that, as temperatures rise, the ice at the north and south poles melts. Any living thing that depends on ice will face extreme challenges. Species will need to relocate to new areas with compatible temperatures, but those with species-area relationships will have a more difficult time, like trees, and other plant life. The questions is how well they can adapt to tolerate disruptive changes in their environment.
Chapter 9, Islands on Dry Land, introduces the idea of "patch dynamics." As environments fragment, they become "islands," too small to sustain species numbers. They become "an obstacle course for the dispersal of biodiversity."
Chapters
Chapter 10, The new Pangea, explains that there is an "evolutionary arms race" going on in which species need to defend themselves against all potential predators because global trade and travel are creating a virtual "Pangea." In this chapter, the creature is bats, with white noses, a cold-loving fungus probably imported from Europe. Another example is the American chestnut tree, attacked by a fungus in the 1800s, unintentionally imported, that was nearly 100% lethal.
Chapter 11, The Rhino Gets Ultrasound, tells the story of the Sumatran rhino, once so populous that it was considered an agricultural pest. But as the forests of southeastern Asia were cut down, and its habitat fragmented, the population shrunk to just a few hundred. It took decades before a captive breeding program produced even a single calf.
Chapters
Chapter 12, The Madness Gene, explains the demise of Neanderthal man through cross-breeding with Homo sapiens, although we do still carry 1-4% of Neanderthal DNA.
Chapter 13, The Things with Feathers, is a chapter about hope that points to various conservation and preservation efforts, like the Frozen Zoo. She also recalls Rachel Carson and the effects of DDT on the American eagle and the condor who exemplified “the problem of sharing our earth with other creatures.” She concludes, "life is extremely resilient, but not infinitely so." Whether or not intentional, mankind is deciding which evolutionary pathways will end and which will remain.
Questions for discussion
One reviewer described Kolbert's style as descriptive rather than prescriptive. In other words, she's a storyteller, including her personal memoirs of her exploratory travels.
Is this a good narrative strategy?
Storytelling
Stories are powerful because they are a hardwired human instinct for making meaning, connecting with others, and understanding the world, engaging the brain emotionally and socially, and creating memorable, actionable information. Through narrative, our brains synchronize, release chemicals like oxytocin that foster empathy, and process complex ideas, allowing us to learn, form opinions, and drive collective change in a way that facts alone cannot achieve.
Storytelling
Psychological and Cognitive Reasons--We think and learn through stories:
Humans are naturally drawn to narratives; we think in metaphors and learn through stories, making them a primary way to process information and understand the world.
Stories provide order and meaning: Narrative structure offers comfort by providing a familiar and predictable way to organize thoughts and make sense of life's complexities, turning complex information into a memorable and relatable format.
Imagination and empathy are engaged: Stories transport listeners to different perspectives, triggering the imagination and increasing empathy by engaging parts of the brain that process experiences as if they were real.
Storytelling
Biological and Emotional Reasons--Brain synchronization and chemistry:
When listening to a story, the brain's activity synchronizes with the storyteller's, and the release of oxytocin can increase compassion, trust, and cooperation.
Memorable information: Data embedded in a story is up to 22 times more memorable than raw statistics, leading to better retention and a deeper connection to the information.
Emotional engagement: Stories create an emotional experience for the audience, fostering deeper connection and motivating people to action in a way that purely factual data often fails to do.
Storytelling
Social and Cultural Reasons--Connection and shared understanding:
Storytelling is a primal form of communication that transcends generations, creating bonds between people and sharing passions, sorrows, and common experiences.
Persuasion and change: By evoking emotions and shifting perspectives, stories can persuade people to change their attitudes, behaviors, and even broader social or political views.
Cultural continuity: Stories have been used since the beginning of humankind to spread information, preserve cultural identity, and connect people to universal truths and a larger sense of self
Questions for discussion
Other reviewers have called her an historian, taking us on a tour of earth's long long history and mankind's role in our much shorter history on planet earth. What does this historical perspective add to our understanding?
Questions for discussion
What other narrative strategies does Kolbert draw upon to tell this story, make it understandable, and interesting? How does she get her point across?
Questions for discussion
Which of Kolbert's chapters (stories) did you find most interesting, or most disturbing?
Questions for discussion
Has reading this book changed your thinking about climate change. If so, how?
What have your learned?
How has your perspective changed?
Video
E. O. Wilson on PBS News Hour about Half Earth
UD's climate change hub