Elizabeth Kolbert has visited the Greenland ice sheet on multiple occasions, but it was her first trip to the glacier 25 years ago, when she stood atop its summit, that changed her perspective on the climate challenges faced by Earth and set her on a path to writing about those issues.
“It was mind-bending,” the Pulitizer Prize-winning author and former New York Times reporter recalled of that visit, adding that the planet was once covered by many ice sheets similar in size to the Greenland ice sheet.
Since then, Kolbert has traveled the world to document and report on such issues—from Shishmaref, Alaska, where she met villagers faced with the prospect of abandoning their homes because of rapid coastal erosion, to Iceland, where she visited carbon-capture projects in lava fields and reported on melting glaciers.
She’s been to the Great Barrier Reef and the Amazon Rainforest. And once, she visited the University of Miami Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric, and Earth Science, meeting with researchers to learn about their efforts in saving coral reefs that are under assault from warming ocean temperatures.
This Tuesday, the award-winning author, who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999, returns to the Rosenstiel School for a fireside-style chat with former NBC News correspondent Kerry Sanders. During the talk, which is part of the Sea Secrets Lecture Series, Kolbert will discuss her latest book, “Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World,” a collection of essays that captures an era of ecological change.
Kolbert and Sanders will also revisit themes from the author’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History” as well as from other influential works that illuminate the impacts of the climate crisis, species decline, and the choices that will shape Earth’s future.
During an interview with News@TheU, Kolbert discussed a range of topics, including how, after more than two decades of reporting on climate-related topics, her objective in documenting such news has never wavered.
“My goal has always been pretty simple: to inform people about what’s going on,” she said. “Is the message getting through? On some level, yes. I think people—not because of my work but because of many people’s work and because of their lived experience, especially in a place like Florida—are understanding that the planet is changing and that these are pretty monumental changes. But is it getting through in terms of people taking the risks seriously in public policy? That part is not so much, let’s put it that way.”
Kolbert offered counsel to college students, many of whom will bear the responsibility of addressing and solving environmental problems that plague the planet long after the current generation of climate scientists and policymakers have passed on.
“My advice for them is to be informed and to get involved,” she said. “It’s now clearer than ever that politically, this is a problem that’s going to require massive political change to address in a meaningful way. And they are the key to whether politicians pay any attention or not.”
Kolbert, whose work “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future” was named one of the best books of 2021 by The Washington Post, TIME, and Publishers Weekly, also discussed the challenges of reporting on environmental issues. “One of the real challenges is that it’s a story that’s not going away,” she explained. “The basic predictions about what’s going to happen, which are now in the process of being born out, were made many years ago. So, it’s not like, ‘Oh my God, there’s something new every day to report on.’
“So how do you combat that sense of, ‘Oh, well, I’ve read this before. I’ve heard this before’? And I think the answer is all the above. People must try everything, including new creative approaches that I’m sure I haven’t thought of yet.”
Kolbert’s Sea Secrets talk, “Dispatches From a Changing World: In Conversation With Kerry Sanders,” will be held Tuesday, Feb. 10, at 5:30 p.m. in the Rosenstiel School Auditorium, with a reception following the program.
The event is free and open to the public, but RSVP is required. The talk will also be streamed live via Zoom.
To attend in person, RSVP here. To see chat via Zoom, log on here.
