Episode 315: Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

“I still nurse the idea in my heart of hearts that something you write, that there’s some key to this all. We’re all looking for the skeleton key that’s going to unlock it, and people will go, ‘Oh, that’s why we have to do something!’ I don’t want to say that I completely dispensed with that. I think that’s what motivates most journalists—this information is going to somehow make a difference. On the other hand, I have dispensed a lot of that. Now we’re so deep into all of this. The more you know about climate change and the numbers involved and the scale involved of what we need to do to really mitigate this problem, you know that we’re moving in absolutely the wrong direction. It’s not like we’re moving slowly, we’re moving in the wrong direction. It’s very hard to say anything I write is going to turn this battleship around.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Skagen, Squarespace, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.
@ElizKolbert
Kolbert on Longform
[0:10]The TED Interview
[0:45]Underdog
[2:20] The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Picador • 2014)
[2:25] Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (Bloomsbury • 2006)
[7:55] "The Fate of Earth" (New Yorker • Oct 2017)
[22:30] "The Calculator" (New Yorker • Nov 2002)
[28:45] The End of Nature (Bill McKibben • Random House • 2006)
[40:05] "The Climate of Man" (New Yorker • Apr 2005)
[40:20] "The Darkening Sea" (New Yorker • Nov 2006)
[40:30] "Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man" (National Geographic • Nov 2006)
[40:30] No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies (William Vollman • Viking • 2018)
[40:35] No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies (William Vollman • Viking • 2018)
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Elizabeth Kolbert, author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change and The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, is a staff writer at The New Yorker.

“I still nurse the idea in my heart of hearts that something you write, that there’s some key to this all. We’re all looking for the skeleton key that’s going to unlock it, and people will go, ‘Oh, that’s why we have to do something!’ I don’t want to say that I completely dispensed with that. I think that’s what motivates most journalists—this information is going to somehow make a difference. On the other hand, I have dispensed a lot of that. Now we’re so deep into all of this. The more you know about climate change and the numbers involved and the scale involved of what we need to do to really mitigate this problem, you know that we’re moving in absolutely the wrong direction. It’s not like we’re moving slowly, we’re moving in the wrong direction. It’s very hard to say anything I write is going to turn this battleship around.”

Thanks to MailChimp, Skagen, Squarespace, and Pitt Writers for sponsoring this week's episode.
@ElizKolbert
Kolbert on Longform
[0:10]The TED Interview
[0:45]Underdog
[2:20] The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (Picador • 2014)
[2:25] Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (Bloomsbury • 2006)
[7:55] "The Fate of Earth" (New Yorker • Oct 2017)
[22:30] "The Calculator" (New Yorker • Nov 2002)
[28:45] The End of Nature (Bill McKibben • Random House • 2006)
[40:05] "The Climate of Man" (New Yorker • Apr 2005)
[40:20] "The Darkening Sea" (New Yorker • Nov 2006)
[40:30] "Enter the Anthropocene—Age of Man" (National Geographic • Nov 2006)
[40:30] No Immediate Danger: Volume One of Carbon Ideologies (William Vollman • Viking • 2018)
[40:35] No Good Alternative: Volume Two of Carbon Ideologies (William Vollman • Viking • 2018)

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices