Elizabeth Kolbert: Covering the hot topic of climate change by going to the ends of the Earth

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer with The New Yorker who often covers environmental topics. When Kolbert began her career as a reporter and columnist for The New York Times, however, she was assigned to cover New York state politics. As a consequence, Kolbert says, she has reported about some of the world’s most depressing topics: extinction, climate change, and Albany politics.

In 2005, her three-part magazine series on global warming won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award, a National Magazine Award, and a National Academies’ communications award. She explored the topic in more depth in her subsequent book Field Notes from a Catastrophe. She went on to write several more books about environmental issues, and her latest work on the topic, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, came out in February. It explores the relationship between the heating-up of the planet and a constellation of negative and connected consequences, including fragmentation of habitat and the spread of invasive species.

Her new book is essentially three stories in one: an intellectual history about ideas that were discovered, discarded, and rediscovered; a history of life and the five major mass-extinction events that have occurred on this planet, in which 75 percent of species disappeared; and a story of new discoveries about climate-related environmental changes, such as ocean acidification, aka “global warming’s evil twin.”

According to Kolbert, “We’re putting a lot of carbon into the air very fast, at a rate last seen during the Permian Era. We’re already geoengineering the climate, but we don’t admit it.”

Ninety-seven percent of researchers agree that the climate is changing and that the change is largely human-made, a level of agreement that is extraordinary in science. Despite the evidence, large numbers of Americans don’t believe climate change is occurring, something that is untrue of the rest of the world. (A New York Times article of May 6, 2014 was aptly titled “Americans Are Outliers in Views on Climate Change.”) ¹

In an interview with the Bulletin, ² Kolbert delved into the denialist phenomenon, field research, charismatic megafauna, saving wildlife, her expectations for the future, and a variety of other interests.

BAS: To do this book, you must have traveled to many places, from Australia to the Amazon, and gone into the field with a number of researchers.

Kolbert: I counted up four continents, nine countries. I did sometimes do the research for the book as part of my travel for a magazine assignment—sometimes I’d go somewhere as part of a New Yorker story, and one or two times I was in places I had to go to for National Geographic. That didn’t always work out, to be honest, but that was my goal. But I usually had it in the back of my mind that what I was doing was eventually going to be in the book.

BAS: What inspired you to do The Sixth Extinction in particular? Something that came from your magazine reporting?

Kolbert: I just set off to do a piece, which happened to be about climate change. It wasn’t like “I’m going to change my whole life,” but it ended up taking over everything and becoming a series.

BAS: You fell in love with the topic?

Kolbert: More like I got sucked into it. And many people will tell you the same story: “I set out to do something else, and this just took over my life.”

BAS: So there was not one particular “aha” moment?

Kolbert: No, what happened was that around 2000, I had just gone to The New Yorker and started to look into doing a piece on climate change, which at the time was still kind of new to the general media. I didn’t know what there was to be found; I found myself thinking, “Is this a huge problem or not?” And very quickly I found that it was. I talked to five scientists and they all said: “Yes, this is real, this is big.” And then I was thinking, “I’ve got to find a way to write about this, and about why people don’t know about it.” And I found the way to get at the topic was by focusing on the story of the Arctic, which became part of a three-part series, and it sort of snowballed from there, to use a bad pun.

BAS: In other parts of the world, such as Europe, anthropogenic climate change is widely accepted, even among people you wouldn’t expect, such as Swiss bankers—who tend to be a very conservative bunch. So when expatriate Americans return home to the States, they’re surprised by the difference in perception. Why do you think there is such a split?

Kolbert: I think a lot of it is due to a very well-financed disinformation campaign over here.

And I think that our politics of the last 30 years is just different. What we consider to be left-wing politics, the Europeans consider to be centrist politics. I mean, look at our tax policies, look at everything, and look at the kind of know-nothing right we have. Don’t get me wrong; the know-nothing right exists in Europe, I don’t want to claim it doesn’t. But it’s not very powerful, compared to here. And I think Europe is much more run by technocrats—you know, Brussels, etcetera—which means that certain facts are accepted.

All this manifests itself in unexpected ways: I had dinner once, after my book on climate change came out, with a Dutch minister from a right-wing, conservative party—the Christian Democrats or whatever—and he sounded like a Greenpeace guy.

So, I think that we in the USA live in a weird country. We and the Australians are the only ones with this mind-set—and we both happen to have a lot of fossil-fuel resources too, which may be a part of it.

BAS: Who is your intended audience for the book and what do you expect people to do after reading it? What do you hope they will do?

Kolbert: I don’t want to sound ridiculous, but I did try to write it with everybody in mind. So if you just happened to pick it up—for whatever reason—you would get drawn into the story. That was how I tried to write it, for a lay audience that doesn’t think it would be interested in the subject matter at first. Now, will those people actually take up the cause? Well, I can’t make them do that. It’s a question more of informing people.

BAS: Publishers often claim “the environment is not a hot topic.” At the same time, people care a lot about animals, as evidenced by statistics that show that more people visit zoos and aquariums every year than attend baseball, football, and basketball games combined. Why the discrepancy?

Kolbert: I wrote a piece about zoos for National Geographic, and I found that same statistic. So, you know, people do love animals—look at our pets, our dogs, our cats, our rabbits, whatever—and I definitely wanted to tap into that, and get the zoo-going audience, not just the Sierra Club audience (although it is a million strong, and there are a lot of audiences like that). But it’s definitely tough to convince someone who is predisposed to think it’s not for them.

You do run into this problem where the people who are interested and concerned and reading about the general subject matter—in Sierra or OnEarth or Audubon or whatever—tell themselves, “Well, I already know about this particular topic, so I don’t need to read this book.” And the people who aren’t will say, “I’m not interested.”

I think that is the problem that environmental books run into; it’s like everyone who should get the book thinks they already know about it and are not interested in buying it. It’s like the old Yogi Berra line: “Nobody goes there anymore because it’s too crowded.”

And the ones who aren’t interested just won’t read it.

BAS: The book goes into the interrelated problems of climate change, such as the movement of invasive species from tropical zones into temperate zones that comes along with the change of climate. It also goes into the allied issues of ocean acidification, and the fragmentation of habitat. Why do you think that, on the whole, there has been so little coverage of these related topics in the general media?

Kolbert: I think that it’s complicated subject matter, and it hadn’t been pulled all together in one place. Each individual part is complicated enough; for example, our understanding of just one component—ocean acidification—is pretty new.

I think that when it comes to ocean acidification, a couple of things came together, and that created a sudden realization among scientists that it existed. Even though on one level you would say that the chemistry of it is really obvious and really easy, people hadn’t really put two and two together. The chemists and the marine biologists weren’t talking to each other. People still don’t entirely understand the process of calcification [how marine organisms make shells and corals build reefs], so it’s still a somewhat mysterious process.

And some of the textbooks have the formula wrong!

So a bunch of things had prevented people from seeing the magnitude of the problem. Then, when people started to get experimental results, they could get theory and experiment to line up; then, they were like “Oh, my god.”

So, I really just think it was all just a little bit too complicated and too sudden for the popular press. When I wrote that piece on ocean acidification and its effect on corals for The New Yorker in 2006, I tried to get the formula for acidification into the magazine, but I just had to bail out. The editors were just like, “No. No one’s going to read this.” As soon as you get into chemistry and chemical reactions with logarithmic functions, it’s just out of people’s comfort zones.

BAS: Yet your book does have an equation—and has generated a lot of press—in spite of the old saying in book publishing that “Every time you put in a formula, you cut your potential audience in half.”

Kolbert: Well, I do have a formula in there. But it’s pretty deep in the book. [Laughs.]

BAS: What about the mechanics of the book? Were you ever afraid of sprawl, that there would be too many characters, too many places, and too many concepts for readers to deal with? Were you afraid of losing the reader?

Kolbert: Oh yeah. Definitely. I tried to make it so that every chapter was freestanding, so you only had to remember a few things through the end of the chapter. Some characters do come back from elsewhere, but not that many. The goal was to make it so that the chapters can be read discretely, and you don’t have to keep details in your head for the whole book. You just need to keep a few, key certain concepts in your mind to get through one chapter.

That’s the nature of writing about science. Science is seldom a case of one person doing things alone; it’s nearly always a collaborative, group effort. So it is not easily given to a single narrative line involving one person. If I could find a story like that, I’d be happy to write it. But you seldom find it.

I do love a good story of a single scientist triumphing over a problem, and some of the pieces in the book originally appeared in the New Yorker more as individual profiles—one of them, for example, was very much a profile about the guy who sequenced the Neanderthal genome. But science today is a collaboration of thousands of people. So you are forced to string together multiple, stand-alone profiles into a single book; each from a separate magazine assignment.

You’re really limited in your subject in science if you try to just say that so-and-so discovered such-and-such. Scientific stories tend to be stories of discovery, and those discoveries come from multiple threads. Science is not linear, it sort of weaves around. An example of that in this book was the story of catastrophic change, which was sort of discovered, discredited, and rediscovered in a new form. That’s not unusual in science.

BAS: A lot of people do not seem to realize that huge numbers of species will soon be lost forever, on a massive scale. Why not? Is there some sort of psychological barrier? Is it because extinction happens locally, and slowly enough among large creatures that we don’t notice it until it’s too late? And no one really notices the coming or going of small creatures?

Kolbert: I don’t think that people don’t accept that species are going extinct. I think that what they don’t get is that this is normally an extremely weird and rare event.

We have grown up with the idea of extinction; any kid can tell you that the panda is going extinct, the grizzly bear is endangered, the polar bear is endangered. Any kid nowadays can list 10 species that they know are in deep trouble: the rhinos, the tigers, the elephants. And everyone is just like, “Well, species go extinct; that’s what happens.”

I don’t think that people realize—and I really hope this book makes them realize—that you should not see a species go extinct in your lifetime. If there is something going extinct in your lifetime, then there is something very weird going on. And that is a mass extinction.

I’ve had people say to me—smart people, who have gone to Ivy League schools—that “well, if things go extinct, won’t new things evolve?” And you have to explain to them that yes, in 10 million years, something new will come up. But not tomorrow, and not on any scale that’s meaningful to people.

BAS: What arguments for saving species do you find most persuasive? Their usefulness to humankind? The immorality of destroying other living things? How each species is needed for the stability and diversity of the ecosystem? How humans do not want to live in a world without a variety of beautiful, unusual creatures?

Kolbert: I think that all those are valid, but in my book I don’t make an argument. To be frank, I just avoid that whole issue. I just take it for granted that any species has as much of a right to exist as we do. What right does any species have to drive another one to extinction?

If you exterminate people, we call that genocide and we take it very seriously. But when we do it to animals… I don’t think history will judge us very well for what we have been doing, and doing at colossal speed. These species can’t speak for themselves. And that is part of the point of this book; to speak for those that have no voice.

It sounds a little vain, but I would like to think that the book speaks for species that cannot speak for themselves. I hesitate to put it that way, but that is definitely part of the project. It’s one of the reasons that each chapter has a species, to try to make their claim.

BAS: Is the impulse to protect species a case of what Harvard evolutionary biologist E. O. Wilson calls “biophilia”?

Kolbert: Unfortunately, I think that feeling is not as powerful as I might have hoped. If it were, we wouldn’t have to be explaining to people why it’s not such a nice thing to drive a species extinct. People are not good at extending their love beyond Rover to all of creation, and certainly not to the worms and nematodes in the garden. Ed Wilson loves ants, and I think ants are cool, too. But most people really don’t care if a species of ant goes extinct.

We see a lot of these species as our enemy, and many of them are in some way. I don’t want to paint some utopic view of nature. Nature is red in tooth and claw, and we’ve killed off a lot of animals that would have been happy to kill us. I think that deep in the chimp part of our brain, we don’t like a lot of things on a deep level. We don’t like snakes, we don’t like animals with big teeth, and there’s a deep evolutionary reason for that. So we’re perfectly happy to live in cities where all the native species are gone.

So, sadly, I don’t think that biophilia alone is going to carry us through.

BAS: What has been the reaction of academics to your book? How do you deal with charges of anthropomorphizing creatures? For example, in a section about a national park in Peru, you use words like “charismatic,” “crazy,” and “clever” to describe plants—do the botanists ever give you grief on this? And how do scientists respond when you write that a frog “looks intelligent”?

Kolbert: Well, no one’s complained so far. [Laughs.]

BAS: On the flip side, what about charges of being too dispassionate—those readers who want more emotion and “This is how I felt”?

Kolbert: Some people complained that at the very end of the book, I didn’t give them the kind of either heart-wrenching, or apocalyptic, or “here’s-how-we’re-gonna-save-ourselves” kind of ending that they wanted. There was no emotional payoff. And that was pretty purposeful. I definitely left it up to you how you want to respond. And I like to think that that’s treating your reader as an intelligent human being. But I know that some people felt that the book ended too quickly, that it didn’t tell you where I was coming from.

But if I had the answer, I’d give it to you, and put it right in the book. I don’t know how you overcome that. But at least I’ve shown that this issue is something we all should be thinking about.

Should we blame scientists? No, we should blame ourselves. It’s not like the information isn’t out there, or environmentalists are too gloomy. These are just hard problems that we, as a society, don’t want to deal with. I mean, here we are, a day after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report came out, which said, “Get your act together now, or better yet, yesterday.” And as a society we’re continuing to ignore the problem.

BAS: So you do not go for the confessional, wearing-my-emotions-on-my-sleeve approach? You find it contrived?

Kolbert: I’m not a scientist, and I’m not a naturalist. But I tried to be pretty careful with what my claim on your attention is, and not to overstep that. My goal was to bring together information from the scientific press, and from what I saw out in the field with a lot of people who are very knowledgeable.

BAS: On a related note, scientists often accuse science writers of just being interested in what wildlife biologists term “charismatic megafauna,” such as lions, tigers, rhinos, and bears. Likewise, environmental activists have been criticized for putting too much emphasis on polar bears and not enough on the human suffering caused by climate change. Fair criticism?

Kolbert: Yes. I did try to avoid that, by focusing on things such as corals, ammonites, and graptolites—nothing can be less charismatic than a graptolite [small, fossilized stick-like creatures that resemble hieroglyphs].

Amphibians played a big role in the book; I’m a huge fan of amphibians, I think they’re amazing animals. So, yes, charismatic animals such as mammals have an oversized role in the book, and birds have an oversized role, but I tried not to write about just lions and tigers.

BAS: Were you ever tempted to become a scientist?

Kolbert: You know, when I was out with these guys in the field, I thought, “Wow, I would have liked to have done this as a career.” But I’m 30 years out of college, and I only took one or two science courses in my whole life. So it’s not like it was an option that was narrowly avoided. It just never entered my mind earlier.

BAS: To paraphrase a college textbook described the field of science journalism as “a never-ending graduate school of the mind, in which your instructors are the most brilliant faculty in the world, willing to explain their latest research to you in a private, one-on-one tutorial.”

Kolbert: Oh my god, I love it. That is exactly right. I’m a person who barely passed college physics, and when I was writing about the Large Hadron Collider for The New Yorker, I was dealing with Nobel Prize winners at CERN who were explaining their work to me; and the same was true about the natural historians with this book. I had the top scientists explaining ocean acidification to me, and it was amazing.

There is this terrible divide between science and everything else, in terms of communicating what they are doing and why. In a much more profound way, going beyond funding for science, if people don’t appreciate or understand what the scientists are doing and why, that spells trouble. Take climate change: If people don’t understand what’s going on, and don’t take collective action on a global scale, the planet is screwed, along with humans and everything else on it.

BAS: The opening of your book talks about rats (and other hitchhikers that like to associate with humans), and the last sentence ends with rats. Do you think humans will eventually become extinct because of climate change? Will rats, cockroaches, and pigeons—which some ornithologists describe as “rats with wings”—inherit the Earth?

Kolbert: I don’t think the prognosis for humans is that bad. I might put humans in the same category as rats, in that we are an extremely adaptable species, we’re extremely clever, and we’re generalists. So, humans and organisms that thrive in close proximity to humans will be fine, for a while. Humans will not go extinct in the near future—but a lot of bad things can happen between here and extinction.

BAS: After doing all this research about mass extinctions, how does it make you feel about the future? Are you optimistic about our abilities to rescue these creatures from extinction?

Kolbert: It’s grim; it’s hard to find good news. Sometimes the species wink out while you are reporting about them. One of the last Sumatran rhinos—a creature I wrote about, named Suci—died while I was in the writing phase of the book.

BAS: Humankind does not come off too well, does it—Homo sapiens is described in the book as an “overkiller.”

Kolbert: Overkiller means that you are a killer in an unsustainable way. We are a unique predator, probably in the history of life. We can predate upon things that are bigger than we are, that are faster than we are—something that is not practicable unless you have sophisticated hunting techniques, tools and so on. So we are a very dangerous predator. There’s a guy I quote in the book who says that we can hunt pretty much anything into extinction, and I think we’ve proved that. We haven’t done it for every large mammal so far, but I think we could.

BAS: Are there any scientists out there today who have legitimate doubts that we are experiencing a mass extinction—“extinction deniers,” if you will?

Kolbert: No. But I think there are people out there who would say that each of the big five extinctions eliminated 75 percent of the species on Earth, and we have not come close to that yet. And I would agree with that. But that’s not the issue. It’s that we are at very elevated extinction rates that are heading towards a major mass extinction. And I don’t think there are very many people in this field who would disagree with that.

I mean, paleontologists do tend to be pretty conservative, because they look at the end of the Permian and the end of the Cretaceous hundreds of millions of years ago, when 75 percent of all species went extinct in sudden catastrophes. And they might say we’re not going to make those numbers right now, it’s just not practical.

But even they would say that extinction rates in the modern era are very, very high, and if we keep doing what we are doing, we’ll reach that level. I quoted a scientist in The New Yorker recently who said that an end-Permian-like result of what we are doing is possible. And if that is not shocking, I don’t know what is—the more we learn about the end-Permian, the more frightening the parallels become. And that is a bad sign.

BAS: What do you expect those who read your book to do about the problems it illustrates? Do you have any solutions to offer?

Kolbert: My hope for the book is that people look at the world differently. I’m not offering solutions, I am illustrating the problem for a popular audience.

Now, what are the practical ramifications of that? I think that if you take the book seriously you would entertain the possibility that things have to be done very radically differently from the way they are being done today. As a society, we should be having conversations that are not about changing things at the edges but at a deep, profound level. The book points up the problem, and shows that these are not problems that can be solved just by recycling your bottles. It needs something bigger. So, I definitely do not say, “Here are the 10 steps we need.”

The environmental movement is in a bad way, and they often get blamed, as in: “The climate is screwed up; you guys have failed.” And on some level, you can say yes, that’s a sign of failure. But I don’t blame environmentalists for that; there are worldwide forces that are very large, on a historical scale, working against them. Things could have gone better, but here we are.

BAS: Did you find yourself getting depressed while covering this topic?

Kolbert: People often ask me did you get depressed, aren’t you depressed for your kids. And on some level, the answer is obviously yes, I am. And on another level, my answer is that that is not the issue. How I feel about it is not the issue; it is just so much bigger than me.

I tried to remind myself of what I was doing and why, and what experiences I was having in the process. While researching the book, I went to the Great Barrier Reef and I went to the Amazon, I went to the Peruvian Andes, and I saw amazing tropical species—especially for an American from New England. And some of it was a great adventure; I had a great time. So even though the subject matter was about accompanying people whose work centered on death and the extinction of whole ecosystems—and their outlook was rarely “Everything’s going to be okay”—it still was amazing. You’re overcome by these places, and how amazing they are. They’re still amazing places, despite the subject matter.

In a way, the more fortunate you’ve been to see some of these amazing animals, creatures, plants, whatever, in all different parts of the world, the more you realize how awful it is that so many of them are winking out.

There’s a quote by the conservationist and author Carl Safina that sums it up well: “The more I sense the miracle, the more intense appears the tragedy.” ³