Dispatches from a Changing World

Life on a Little-Known Planet

Elizabeth Kolbert is a prize-winning journalist, author and visiting fellow at Williams College, Massachusetts. She is the author of The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Under a White Sky and H is for Hope. She has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1999 and has been awarded the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.

A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world 
 
‘To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth’, Rolling Stone advises, ‘you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert.’ From her National Magazine award-winning series The Climate of Man to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert’s work has shaped the way we think about the environment in the twenty-first century. Brought together in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking writing. 
 
An intrepid reporter and a skilful translator of scientific idees, 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.

Elizabeth Kolbert

Important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting

A meticulously researched and deftly crafted work of journalism that explores some of the biggest challenges of our age

A superb and honest reflection of our extraordinary time

One of the great science journalists, Kolbert has for many years been an essential voice, a reporter from the front lines of the environmental crisis... Important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting... Beautifully and insistently, Kolbert shows us that it is time to think radically about the ways we manage the environment; time to work with what we have, using the knowledge we have, with our eyes fully open to the realities of where we are

Kolbert's prose is peppered with...mordant observations, which bring out the humanity (or animality) in her subjects

Under a White Sky... exhibits Kolbert's sculptor-like skill for making climate change feel tangible, happening before our eyes and beneath our fingers

To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth, you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert. . . . It's a tribute to Kolbert's skills as a storyteller that she transforms the quest to deal with the climate crisis into a darkly comic tale of human hubris and imagination that could either end in flames or in a new vision of Paradise

Riveting... inspiring... the premier chronicler of humanity's thoughtless destruction of our habitat

This intimate natural history is both a sober assessment of the ecosystems we have harmed and an exciting description of some of the discoveries that could help undo that damage

Brilliantly executed and urgently necessary

A master elucidator, Kolbert is gratifyingly direct as she assesses our predicament between a rock and a hard place, creating a clarion and invaluable 'book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems

Every paragraph of Kolbert's books has a mountain of reading and reporting behind it....  Urgent, absolutely necessary reading as a portrait of our devastated planet

A tale not of magic-bullet remedies where maybe this time things will be different when we intervene in nature, but rather of deploying a panoply of strategies big and small in hopes that there is still time to make a difference and atone for our past. A sobering and realistic look at humankind's perhaps misplaced faith that technology can work with nature to produce a more liveable planet

A terrific look at humanity's impact on the Earth (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

A wonderful book (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

This is the big story of our age (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

Well-composed snapshots of history, theory and observation that will fascinate, enlighten and appal many readers (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

A distinctive and eloquent voice of conscience... timely, meticulously researched and well-written (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

Compelling (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

Remarkable (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

Read this book (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

Elizabeth Kolbert's cautionary tale, The Sixth Extinction, offers us a cogent overview of a harrowing biological challenge. The reporting is exceptional, the contextualizing exemplary (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

Barry Lopez, author of Arctic Dreams and Horizon

The Sixth Mass Extinction is the biggest story on Earth, period, and Elizabeth Kolbert tells it with imagination, rigor, deep reporting, and a capacious curiosity about all the wondrous creatures and ecosystems that exist, or have existed, on our planet. The result is an important book full of love and loss (praise for: The Sixth Extinction)

David Quammen, author of The Song of the Dodo and Spillover

In Under a White Sky...Elizabeth Kolbert...[combines] curiosity with an acerbic wit to explore humanity's obsession with controlling nature... Kolbert's skill is in presenting compelling stories from the Anthropocene and letting us judge for ourselves

Can we save the natural world in time?

The author of the international bestseller The Sixth Extinction returns to humanity's transformative impact on the environment, now asking: after doing so much damage, can we change nature, this time to save it? 
 
Meet the biologists trying to save the world's rarest fish; the engineers who are turning carbon emissions to stone; the researchers trying to develop a 'super coral'; and the physicists contemplating shooting tiny diamonds into the stratosphere to cool the earth. 
 
Elizabeth Kolbert is one of the most important writers on the environment. Here she investigates the immense challenges humanity faces as we scramble to reverse, in a matter of decades, the effects we've had on the natural world and asks - can we save the natural world in time? 
 
'Important, necessary, urgent' Helen MacDonald 
'Meticulously researched and deftly crafted' Guardian

Elizabeth Kolbert

Praise for Under a White Sky

Important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting

Smart

A meticulously researched and deftly crafted work of journalism that explores some of the biggest challenges of our age

Important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting

Smart

A meticulously researched and deftly crafted work of journalism that explores some of the biggest challenges of our age

Important, necessary, urgent and phenomenally interesting

Smart

A meticulously researched and deftly crafted work of journalism that explores some of the biggest challenges of our age

Books by Elizabeth Kolbert

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