Elizabeth Kolbert
Author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History
About the Author
Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her series on global warming, The Climate of Man, won the American Association for the Advancement of Science's magazine writing award and a National Academies communications award. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner. She has show more written several books including Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, which won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
Image credit: Photo credit: Barry Goldstein
Works by Elizabeth Kolbert
Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change {Updated Edition 2015} (2015) 225 copies, 4 reviews
The Ends of the Earth: An Anthology of the Finest Writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic (2007) — Editor & Contributor — 136 copies, 8 reviews
Eclipse 1 copy
Ο έκτος αφανισμός 1 copy
Under a White Sky 1 copy
Associated Works
The Hidden Life of Ice: Dispatches from a Disappearing World (2019) — Foreword, some editions — 48 copies, 1 review
Fire Fighters: Stories of Survival from the Front Lines of Firefighting (2002) — Contributor — 16 copies
Lost Fish: Anthologies of the Work of the Comte De Lacepede (2009) — Introduction, some editions — 13 copies
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1961
- Gender
- female
- Occupations
- journalist
- Organizations
- The New York Times
The New Yorker - Awards and honors
- Lannan Literary Fellowship (2006)
- Short biography
- Elizabeth Kolbert (born 1961) is an American journalist and author and visiting fellow at Williams College. She spent her early childhood in the Bronx, New York; her family then relocated to Larchmont, New York, where she remained until 1979.
After graduating from Mamaroneck High School, Kolbert spent four years studying literature at Yale University. In 1983, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the Universität Hamburg, in Germany.
Elizabeth Kolbert started working for The New York Times in 1983. Since 1999, she has been a staff-writer for The New Yorker. - Nationality
- USA
- Associated Place (for map)
- USA
Members
Reviews
This is not a cheery book, but then these are not cheery times for the vast majority of Earth's biota. As you would expect by an author that is a staff writer for The New Yorker, the subject is well delivered.
It happens that this is the second book on the same subject I've read, both sharing the same title. The other was by Richard Leakey from 1995. Things haven't improved.
Both detail a natural history of extinction, with the earlier book paying more attention to the previous extinction show more events. The book by Kolbert spends more time documenting the present crises. Both touch on Brazilian experiments with varying sizes of forest reserves, and the Simon/Ehrlich debates. The newer version includes chapters on the vanishing amphibians and bats of the Americas, which hadn't emerged in 1995.
There are three main arguments for preserving natural variety - ecological, economic, and moral. The ecological arguments boil down that humanity is dooming itself by depleting the natural reserves of the Earth, and that through some biological mechanism we'll all end up living out McCarthy's The Road or King's The Stand as the human population crashes.
The economic argument is more pragmatic - with thousands of species disappearing annually, we are throwing away potential medicines or green power sources that it would be to our great benefit to sort out and find before they are lost.
The moral argument is at the center of every WWF fundraising letter with pictures of various doomed megafauna - those pesky shoulds and oughts. The moral argument seems selfless but is essentially selfish - a wish to preserve, conservatively, the status quo.
We are indisputably living during the Earth's sixth extinction event, and causing it. Of course as a supremely comfortable first world inhabitant my best course of action is to buy less junk, burn less fuel, and all those always pertinent bromides. In the end though, I think the biological ending is unavoidable. We are living in a flat ecological world, as long as the planes keep flying. After our end, life will continue on without us, and speciation will recur once we pass, leaving our own KT boundary of plastic and monoculture pollen as a bleak monument. show less
It happens that this is the second book on the same subject I've read, both sharing the same title. The other was by Richard Leakey from 1995. Things haven't improved.
Both detail a natural history of extinction, with the earlier book paying more attention to the previous extinction show more events. The book by Kolbert spends more time documenting the present crises. Both touch on Brazilian experiments with varying sizes of forest reserves, and the Simon/Ehrlich debates. The newer version includes chapters on the vanishing amphibians and bats of the Americas, which hadn't emerged in 1995.
There are three main arguments for preserving natural variety - ecological, economic, and moral. The ecological arguments boil down that humanity is dooming itself by depleting the natural reserves of the Earth, and that through some biological mechanism we'll all end up living out McCarthy's The Road or King's The Stand as the human population crashes.
The economic argument is more pragmatic - with thousands of species disappearing annually, we are throwing away potential medicines or green power sources that it would be to our great benefit to sort out and find before they are lost.
The moral argument is at the center of every WWF fundraising letter with pictures of various doomed megafauna - those pesky shoulds and oughts. The moral argument seems selfless but is essentially selfish - a wish to preserve, conservatively, the status quo.
We are indisputably living during the Earth's sixth extinction event, and causing it. Of course as a supremely comfortable first world inhabitant my best course of action is to buy less junk, burn less fuel, and all those always pertinent bromides. In the end though, I think the biological ending is unavoidable. We are living in a flat ecological world, as long as the planes keep flying. After our end, life will continue on without us, and speciation will recur once we pass, leaving our own KT boundary of plastic and monoculture pollen as a bleak monument. show less
This review was written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.I've read a lot of non-fiction books that are dry and sometimes gets bogged down in details and others that are very engaging but rather light on the meat. And then sometimes, you get a very cogent work with a very rich sampling of science from all different quarters laid out in such a way that it is impossible to believe anything BUT the final summation.
This is one of those works. We are in the middle of the sixth extinction event on Earth. The final result of the dieoff, as of just how show more many millions of species will succumb to the tipped balance of the biosphere, is yet to be known.
But let's put it this way: if you were just informed that there were no jobs in your town and that everyone else was just told that 1/3 of the jobs would remain for the next six months, and then after that, they would leave as well, you'd decide to move away. Right? So, you try to, only you find out that someone has just destroyed all the roads in or out of your town and there's no supply line for foods or services. Imagine the chaos. How would you survive? How would anyone? Now assume you slow that process down just enough that no one or very few people living there have a clue as to the reality of this situation. Belts tighten, poverty increases, some may try to move away but get crushed under the wheels of a much larger machine.
Now extrapolate that situation to every other town in the world.
And then overlay the problem to every other species in the world. Dice up ecospheres, destroy the homes and habitats there, and only the fleet of foot can survive... but where do they go? They're an invasive species now. They take on and live or die in someone else's backward. If it's a human's backyard, it'll get killed. Rinse, repeat. Add disease, and predatory species filling in stressed niches, and you've got a pandemic. Across all species.
Now, remember, a few hundred years or even a few thousand is just a flash in the pan for extinctions. Not all come from meteorites or volcanoes. We probably didn't kill off the Neanderthals by hunting. Economics works just as well. And even if a tribe hunts down a wooly mammoth every ten years, the gestation is slow enough that it would still bring a downward pressure on the species until it's gone in several thousand years. Period. And this isn't even accounting for the widespread death in rainforests now.
Add global warming, acidification of the ocean, the deaths of the coral reefs, the disappearance of the frogs, the bees, and from there, the tipping point that will eradicate larger species as they begin to wipe out other species because their food is disappearing, too, and we've got a major dieback.
In hundreds of years, or even 50, our world might become a bonefield. An optimistic outlook is 25%-50% of everything dead.
THANOS, ANYONE?
Truly a sobering book. One of the very best I've read on extinction events. Only, this one might be ours. show less
This is one of those works. We are in the middle of the sixth extinction event on Earth. The final result of the dieoff, as of just how show more many millions of species will succumb to the tipped balance of the biosphere, is yet to be known.
But let's put it this way: if you were just informed that there were no jobs in your town and that everyone else was just told that 1/3 of the jobs would remain for the next six months, and then after that, they would leave as well, you'd decide to move away. Right? So, you try to, only you find out that someone has just destroyed all the roads in or out of your town and there's no supply line for foods or services. Imagine the chaos. How would you survive? How would anyone? Now assume you slow that process down just enough that no one or very few people living there have a clue as to the reality of this situation. Belts tighten, poverty increases, some may try to move away but get crushed under the wheels of a much larger machine.
Now extrapolate that situation to every other town in the world.
And then overlay the problem to every other species in the world. Dice up ecospheres, destroy the homes and habitats there, and only the fleet of foot can survive... but where do they go? They're an invasive species now. They take on and live or die in someone else's backward. If it's a human's backyard, it'll get killed. Rinse, repeat. Add disease, and predatory species filling in stressed niches, and you've got a pandemic. Across all species.
Now, remember, a few hundred years or even a few thousand is just a flash in the pan for extinctions. Not all come from meteorites or volcanoes. We probably didn't kill off the Neanderthals by hunting. Economics works just as well. And even if a tribe hunts down a wooly mammoth every ten years, the gestation is slow enough that it would still bring a downward pressure on the species until it's gone in several thousand years. Period. And this isn't even accounting for the widespread death in rainforests now.
Add global warming, acidification of the ocean, the deaths of the coral reefs, the disappearance of the frogs, the bees, and from there, the tipping point that will eradicate larger species as they begin to wipe out other species because their food is disappearing, too, and we've got a major dieback.
In hundreds of years, or even 50, our world might become a bonefield. An optimistic outlook is 25%-50% of everything dead.
THANOS, ANYONE?
Truly a sobering book. One of the very best I've read on extinction events. Only, this one might be ours. show less
'Ci sono motivi di ogni tipo, a prima vista i più disparati, alla base dell'estinzione delle specie. Ma percorrete a ritroso il processo per un tratto sufficiente e arriverete inevitabilmente allo stesso colpevole: "una specie infestante".
La classe di animali più a rischio attualmente è quella degli anfibi, e per saperlo non serve andare in Sudamerica, è sufficiente guardare nel giardino di casa. Altri generi e specie animali non sono in situazioni migliori, per esempio, si stima che un show more terzo del totale dei coralli che formano la barriera corallina siano destinati a scomparire a causa dell'acidificazione degli oceani. La perdita di biodiversità è un fenomeno globale che interessa ambienti ed ecosistemi fra i più diversi: dal Sud del Pacifico alle zone artiche al Sahel africano, nei laghi e sulle isole, sulle vette delle montagne e nelle grandi vallate. E tutto questo perché l'industrializzazione nell'ultimo centinaio di anni ha provocato l'immissione massiccia di gas serra nell'atmosfera, modificandone la composizione e determinando sconvolgimenti climatici (siccità, inondazioni,...) sempre più preoccupanti. Un cambiamento veloce, troppo veloce perché le varie specie possano adattarsi.
È a questo punto che sorge un dubbio: non è che "la specie infestante" siamo noi? show less
La classe di animali più a rischio attualmente è quella degli anfibi, e per saperlo non serve andare in Sudamerica, è sufficiente guardare nel giardino di casa. Altri generi e specie animali non sono in situazioni migliori, per esempio, si stima che un show more terzo del totale dei coralli che formano la barriera corallina siano destinati a scomparire a causa dell'acidificazione degli oceani. La perdita di biodiversità è un fenomeno globale che interessa ambienti ed ecosistemi fra i più diversi: dal Sud del Pacifico alle zone artiche al Sahel africano, nei laghi e sulle isole, sulle vette delle montagne e nelle grandi vallate. E tutto questo perché l'industrializzazione nell'ultimo centinaio di anni ha provocato l'immissione massiccia di gas serra nell'atmosfera, modificandone la composizione e determinando sconvolgimenti climatici (siccità, inondazioni,...) sempre più preoccupanti. Un cambiamento veloce, troppo veloce perché le varie specie possano adattarsi.
È a questo punto che sorge un dubbio: non è che "la specie infestante" siamo noi? show less
Each chapter outlines a phenomenon or concept through which it's possible to understand a human-caused factor leading to extinction. e.g.:
- Ocean Acidification, and it's impact on molluscs / corals / etc
- How the way we carve up ecosystems (via roads, forestry, etc) means that species become more climate-sensitive, because they can't move to cooler climates as easily
- How global travel / import / export homogenizes ecosystems, how introduced species fail to take, establish themselves, or show more take over
- The extinction of the Megadons, huge animals, whose evolutionary advantage has historically been 'no predators' at a certain age, but who produce young slowly, turn out to be enormously sensitive to even a small amount of hunting as a species.
I was impressed at how each chapter built off the others -- there's lots of spots where two or three phenomena are interrelated, and the author does a great job of tying these things together, and explaining enormously complex concepts in an understandable way.
I expected *not* to like this book -- I wasn't sure what it was going to be, thought it would be preachy -- but it's an exploration of beautiful, subtle things in the world, and how a lot of it is dying. It's a tragedy more than a science book.
The whole thing is written in an investigative journalist style, the author writes in the first person a lot and details her meetings with individual people in remote locations, and what they ate for dinner, etc. I found this a little annoying at first, but it kinda becomes endearing. The author plays the role of a curious investigator / curious learner well, and the narration is easy to relate to. show less
- Ocean Acidification, and it's impact on molluscs / corals / etc
- How the way we carve up ecosystems (via roads, forestry, etc) means that species become more climate-sensitive, because they can't move to cooler climates as easily
- How global travel / import / export homogenizes ecosystems, how introduced species fail to take, establish themselves, or show more take over
- The extinction of the Megadons, huge animals, whose evolutionary advantage has historically been 'no predators' at a certain age, but who produce young slowly, turn out to be enormously sensitive to even a small amount of hunting as a species.
I was impressed at how each chapter built off the others -- there's lots of spots where two or three phenomena are interrelated, and the author does a great job of tying these things together, and explaining enormously complex concepts in an understandable way.
I expected *not* to like this book -- I wasn't sure what it was going to be, thought it would be preachy -- but it's an exploration of beautiful, subtle things in the world, and how a lot of it is dying. It's a tragedy more than a science book.
The whole thing is written in an investigative journalist style, the author writes in the first person a lot and details her meetings with individual people in remote locations, and what they ate for dinner, etc. I found this a little annoying at first, but it kinda becomes endearing. The author plays the role of a curious investigator / curious learner well, and the narration is easy to relate to. show less
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Statistics
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