In 2005, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert set out to answer an important question once and for all: is climate change real? Her three-part series revealed that, yes, it is real. But that didn’t exactly settle the debate. Today, Kolbert is a pioneer in climate change journalism, exploring the many ways we have tried to face the consequences of our environmental actions. She speaks to us about her reporting journeys and the pressing need to fundamentally examine how we live and consume energy. Plus, she shares how her taste for dark comedy has seeped into her latest book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.
In 2005, New Yorker staff writer Elizabeth Kolbert set out to answer an important question once and for all: is climate change real? Her three-part series revealed that, yes, it is real. But that didn’t exactly settle the debate. Today, Kolbert is a pioneer in climate change journalism, exploring the many ways we have tried to face the consequences of our environmental actions. She speaks to us about her reporting journeys and the pressing need to fundamentally examine how we live and consume energy. Plus, she shares how her taste for dark comedy has seeped into her latest book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future.
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Heather Reisman: Hi, I’m Heather Reisman, and this is Well Said, a podcast on the art and science of living well. This podcast is brought to you by Indigo.
Our climate crisis—the more we hear about it, the more it can feel overwhelming, even insurmountable. While individual choices and actions are essential, experts all agree that the scale of the problem requires big systemic change. So exactly what does this mean? Our guest today has been researching and writing on the past, present, and future of our planet for decades. And she definitely has some views on what will help.
Elizabeth Kolbert is, in fact, a pioneer in climate change journalism. And she continues to make a unique contribution to our knowledge. Her book, The Sixth Extinction, won a Pulitzer Prize in 2015 for its powerful story on how humans are negatively impacting our one and only planet. The Sixth Extinction has been called one of the hundred best non-fiction books of all time. In her latest book, Under A White Sky, Elizabeth shares the stories of a few of the people trying to boldly reverse some of the harms we have caused.
It is a pleasure to welcome Elizabeth to our podcast. And Elizabeth, let me just say on a personal note, I feel it is a such a privilege to be able to have this discussion with you. So thank you.
Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, thank you. I’m honoured.
Heather Reisman: A few context-setting questions that I’d love to ask before we get into the book. Let me start with this. You studied literature at Yale, a subject obviously dear to my heart. Tell us how you came to be a climate change researcher and writer. What started and continues to propel you on this journey?
Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, it’s a bit of a strange path. I actually covered politics for quite a while for The New York Times. That was my first job in journalism. And in the late ‘90s, 1999, I went to work for The New Yorker. And I’ve always been very interested-slash-concerned about environmental issues. This was around 2000 or 2001, I guess, we’re talking now. And I thought, “Well, climate change,” which at that time was an issue still debated by reasonable people. Was this really the biggest deal on the planet or wasn’t it?
And I got this idea, which turned out to be very naïve but sent me down this path of I was going to finally set the question that to rest. I decided that was going to be my big contribution here. And so I set out to write a piece that eventually became three pieces, a series in The New Yorker, that was going to answer this question once and for all—“Is climate change real?”—and get us to move on with the debate. Well, it did answer the question—climate change was real—but it did not succeed in eliminating the debate. Let’s just put it that way.
Heather Reisman: I want to go back a bit to The Sixth Extinction before we get to the new book, because it is just a book that, for me, was sort of the most influential in advancing my thinking. What is The Sixth Extinction? How would that be defined?
Elizabeth Kolbert: In the history of complex life, which is about half a billion years, there have been five of these so-called major mass extinctions when something like three-quarters of all species on Earth went extinct. And the last one, the biggie, the one that everyone knows about was the extinction of the dinosaurs, which it’s pretty clear was caused by an asteroid impact. And the idea of The Sixth Extinction is, well, if you look at extinction rates today, they’re extremely high compared to what are called background rates that apply during most of geological time. And if we keep them up just for another few hundred years, we could reach a major mass extinction. That’s a pretty sobering thought.
Heather Reisman: Have things changed in the six or seven years since you wrote the book?
Elizabeth Kolbert: What we’ve seen in the last six or seven years have been ever increasing impacts. California was on fire for much of the fall. I live on the east coast of the U.S. We could see the impacts of that; we had days when we were seeing haze from the fires in California. Australia burned last winter. The hurricane season on the Gulf Coast this past summer was devastating. So people are seeing ever more freakish weather, so I think the conversation has moved from this hypothetical thing that might happen to “Oh, my gosh, we’re seeing it happen.” I do think we are finally getting to the point where we’re getting beyond that debate but, you know, even so, in the U.S., in Canada, you can still find a lot of people who will not accept what turned out to be sort of basic facts of geophysics.
Heather Reisman: Okay. Let’s get into the latest book. What was your inspiration for this book? And what do you want us to understand?
Elizabeth Kolbert: At the heart of the book is the idea that we have changed the natural world—I use that term loosely—so dramatically that now we’re looking to change it in new ways to counteract the ways we’ve changed it before. The way the book project got started was with a story, that’s actually in the middle of the book, which is a story about a project that had already been nicknamed by the time I visited it. It had already been nicknamed “the super-coral project.” And the idea behind the super-coral project was, well, we’ve changed the oceans, you know, climate change is really wreaking havoc in the oceans—warming the oceans really fast, and also a lot of the CO2 that we put up in the atmosphere very quickly dissolves in the waters of the ocean, changing the chemistry of the oceans. And one group of organisms that really doesn’t like these changes is reef-building corals—these tiny little gelatinous animals that build these amazing structures that are reefs.
And the scientists in Hawaii and Australia had this idea. Well, reefs are really in trouble. We know that. We’re not getting the oceans of the past back in any foreseeable timeframe, any practical timeframe. If we want to have reefs for our kids and our grandchildren, we’re going to have to now try to manipulate reef-building corals. We’re going to have to try to find hardier varieties of corals, somehow, that are going to survive the next century. And that’s what they set out to do.
And the idea that we had sort of changed the oceans and now we were going to try to change the creatures that live in the oceans, that seemed to be quite extraordinary when I thought about it. You know, just this was the new, this was the wave of the future. This is our relationship to nature now. And that set me off on writing this book.
Heather Reisman: You are known for being such a hands-on reporter, doing all you can to fully experience and understand the things you’re exploring. And I’m thinking, what’s going through my mind is being on that boat down that horrible water and the electrifying of the fish. Tell us a bit about the process. Like how do you find a story that you want to explore, and then how you get into it? And I’m so curious about your curiosity.
Elizabeth Kolbert: That story that you’re alluding to, which is the story that opens the book, and the name of the boat is “City Living,” that story is the story of the Chicago River, which was reversed. Literally the flow of the river was reversed about a hundred years ago. And now we’ve gotten to the point—and it’s a complicated sequence of events, but in an attempt to keep invasive species from crossing through this canal, which was built to reverse the flow of the river, a portion of that canal has now been electrified. So if you take a trip down it—as I did in City Living—you eventually get to a point where there are these huge signs that say, you know, “Keep your kids with you. Keep your pets with you. Don’t go in the water. You could end up electrocuted.” And you know, if you did, if you made the mistake of jumping the water, you’d quite possibly be dead. So that story is one that I had heard in bits and pieces over time. And it seemed to me to really be a sort of parable of our time. You know, reversing a river and then finding the effects of that has so many unintended consequences that we need to now electrify part of the river.
And so I set out to take a journey down the river. And it wasn’t easy. I want to say, there aren’t a lot of pleasure craft making that journey. But I finally found a very lovely group of people, Friends of the Chicago River, who work on this river to try to sort of nurse it back to health, who agreed to take me down the Chicago River. And we all had a wonderful adventure.
Heather Reisman: What do you think it would take for us, for each of us, to understand the systemic interconnectedness of things?
Elizabeth Kolbert:Thinking In Systems, the famous book by Donella Meadows, I mean, that’s a hugely important sort of principle for all sort of ecological thinking. But I think that the problem, unfortunately, in my view, is even more complicated than that, because we’re trying to think in systems that we only incompletely understand. And a lot of the stories in the book reflect that. You know, some of them were species that were moved around in the hope that they’d do one thing, and they ended up doing something totally different. They have many, many components that didn’t come together in a logical way necessarily. So it’s not that easy to just say, “OK, we’re gonna, you know, think our way through this,” even if we are trying to think in systems.
Heather Reisman: Another story in the book, it was almost awe-inspiring to me in its concept, is this whole notion of diamond showers as a way of cooling the world and addressing the impact of global warming and its relationship to volcanic cooling. Can you tell us a little bit about that story, or just what that research is about and how you feel about its ambition?
Elizabeth Kolbert: Sure. So that’s really sort of the ultimate intervention to counter an intervention. And for the book, I spent a bunch of time at Harvard where there’s this group called the Harvard Solar Geoengineering Research Program, which gets some money from Bill Gates and from other big philanthropists. And the idea behind solar geoengineering is, you know, we’ve dumped a lot of CO2 into the atmosphere, we’re warming the planet—we kind of all know that now—what could we do to counteract that? One of the big challenges with climate change is carbon dioxide hangs around for a long time. It will warm the Earth for a long time. So even once we stop emitting carbon—which I certainly hope we will do—we will not have solved the problem, we will simply not be making the problem worse anymore.
So if you wanted to do something fast about climate change, if you decided, “Well, we really can’t live with the climate that we have, it’s a humanitarian disaster, it’s an ecological disaster,” the only mechanism that scientists have thought of to counter that is to intervene again by spraying something—either sulfur dioxide, or calcium carbonate, or potentially tiny bits of diamond dust—into the stratosphere that would reflect sunlight back to space, and that would have a cooling effect. And as you said, that’s what volcanoes do. If you get a major volcanic eruption, it spews a lot of sulfur dioxide into the stratosphere. That drifts around, creates this kind of haze. You get these fantastic sunsets. And you get a temporary cooling. And if you imitated that, you wouldn’t want it temporary. If you wanted a kind of perpetual effect, you’d have to sort of keep replenishing that. And so that’s the idea. To call it controversial is an understatement, but that is the idea.
Heather Reisman: All through that chapter, I just couldn’t help but have Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds rolling around in my head.
Elizabeth Kolbert: Exactly. Me too.
Heather Reisman: It was just like unbelievable.
Elizabeth Kolbert: I wanted to make a joke about that but I couldn’t think of how to do it.
Heather Reisman: Well, you succeeded because that’s exactly the image that came to me. You say that a problem this big requires bold political, economic, and technological moves. Just give us an example of what would constitute a technological move, or a political move, that would be reflective of the scale of action that you would say, “Wow, if this happened, that would be real progress.”
Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, we see on the horizon, for example, California has said it’s going to stop selling internal combustion engine cars in 2030. If that really happens, you know, if we’re all around in 2030, and there are no more internal combustion cars being sold—now admittedly, there’ll still be a lot on the road—in California, which is such a big part of the American car market that it ripples through the whole system, that would be an indication that we’re taking this problem seriously. So that’s one possibility.
Heather Reisman: With all that you know and all that you’ve experienced and all that you’ve seen, what do you really hope that we, as individuals, should, could do in our everyday lives to advance us in a way that is meaningful?
Elizabeth Kolbert: Those of us who live in affluent parts of the world need to really examine things pretty fundamentally. I mean, what’s driving this problem is, you know, how we get our energy and how much of it we consume. And we, in the U.S. and Canada, are just energy hogs—I’m going to be frank about it—we have among the highest CO2 footprints on the planet. So we really need to think about how we live from the bottom up, which includes everything from where we live—issues of sprawl—the kind of homes we live in. I don’t expect people to tear down their house, but we really need to think, going forward, what is the world that we want it to look like for our kids and start making planning, and zoning, and infrastructure decisions that reflect that. And unless we do that, we’re simply continuing to dig this hole. I mean, certainly we need to stop digging the hole: that’s step one.
Heather Reisman: One of the things I experienced in the writing is it’s so much fun to read. Maybe that was not your intention, but it is fun to read, because some of the stories are just….
Elizabeth Kolbert: That was my intention.
Heather Reisman: OK. Oh, good. Excellent. Because there is a kind of humour, albeit it could be a bit a dark comic humour. But I do experience it at critical moments, almost interspersed, that carried me along. Help us understand how that is part of your storytelling.
Elizabeth Kolbert: Well, I definitely, I myself am really attracted to, you know, the darkly comic. That’s just a taste issue. How’s that? And my favourite movie of all time is Dr. Strangelove, which is the sort of quintessential dark comedy. So that is definitely part of it; it’s just a taste and a tone issue. But also part of it is, I think, that there can be a kind of sameness and a kind of overwhelmed kind of hitting people over the head with some of these figures, and facts, and problems. And I think that I was hoping to do something a bit different that where the tone and the subject matter were not neatly lined up.
Heather Reisman: We always have a bit of fun at the end of every episode, asking just some random general questions. My favourite, which is: What books have you read that you say, “They fundamentally moved me, like these are books that I go back to or I always think about because they really impacted me in a significant way?”
Elizabeth Kolbert: The book that I always go back to is a book I got for a course in college which was The Complete Works of Kafka. And I use a Kafka quote for the epigraphs for the book. And I am a huge Kafka fan. And so those stories pack such an incredible punch. And they do, no matter how many times you read them.
Heather Reisman: I would agree that his fundamental ability to understand humanity, to make us think, in such a deliberate way. What are you reading now?
Elizabeth Kolbert: Right now I’m reading The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. It’s a book that I had never read and that is sort of always considered one of the great works of American literature. And it is a very impressive book.
Heather Reisman: It’s good. What brings you joy?
Elizabeth Kolbert: I would say actually being out in the closest thing that we have to the wild these days. I love to hike. And garden, I’m a gardener; that’s not exactly wild. But those are some of the activities that give me joy.
Heather Reisman: And I just think about this Dr. Strangelove and Kafka, what a fantastic set of bookends, I think, to inspire us.
Thank you so much for your deep commitment to something, to illuminating things which we so need to understand. And as I said at the opening, it’s a privilege to have you. I feel personally so fortunate. And thank you. Really, thank you.
Elizabeth Kolbert: Oh, well thanks for having me.
[music]
Heather Reisman: Thank you for tuning in to our conversation with Elizabeth Kolbert. For more ideas to help you live well, including the books featured in this episode, visit indigo.ca/podcast. If you enjoyed this podcast, please leave us a rating on Apple Podcasts. You can, however, subscribe wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Well Said was produced for Indigo Inc. by Vocal Fry Studios and is hosted by me, Heather Reisman.
Shivani Persad: The information provided in this podcast should not be relied upon by our listeners as medical advice, even where it has been presented by physicians or medical practitioners. Any information presented in this podcast is not, nor is it intended to be, a substitute for professional medical advice, diagnosis, or treatment. The views expressed throughout this podcast represent the views of the guests and do not necessarily represent the views of Indigo.