Foreign thinker
Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth KolbertScience and Environmental JournalismAmericanb. 1961
Right now, in the amazing moment that to us counts as the present, we are deciding, without quite meaning to, which evolutionary pathways will remain open and which will forever be closed. No other creature has ever managed this, and it will, unfortunately, be our most enduring legacy.
In their times
Open in the Timeline of ThoughtLife and Thought
Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist and author, a longtime staff writer for The New Yorker, known worldwide for her deeply reported writing on climate change and the environmental crisis. Her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and became one of the most influential works on humanity's role in driving species extinction.
Elizabeth Kolbert was born on July 6, 1961. She spent her early childhood in the Bronx, New York, before her family moved to Larchmont. After high school, she spent four years studying literature at Yale University, and in 1983 received a Fulbright Scholarship to study at the University of Hamburg in Germany. It was during this period that she began her journalism career as a stringer for The New York Times in Germany.
From 1984 to 1999 she worked at The New York Times, covering, among other things, the Albany bureau and presidential campaigns. In 1999 she joined The New Yorker as a staff writer, and especially after the George W. Bush administration withdrew the United States from the Kyoto Protocol in 2001, she turned her focus increasingly toward climate change and the environment.
Her most significant books include Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006), drawn from her reporting on global warming; The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014), which weaves together natural history, paleontology, and field reporting to show how human activity has triggered what she argues is the sixth mass extinction event in Earth's history; and Under a White Sky (2021), which examines technological responses to environmental crises. The Sixth Extinction won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.
The central idea running through Kolbert's work is that humans, far from standing apart from nature, have become a geological force shaping the future course of life on Earth — a process she connects to the concept of the "Anthropocene." She has also served on the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board, and her writing has repeatedly been anthologized in collections of the best American science and nature writing.
