For more than 15 years, Elizabeth Kolbert has been covering the impact humans have had on the environment. In that time, she says, her beat hasn’t changed as much as one might hope.
“When I started out, there was sort of a sense that if people knew what was going on, they would come to their senses and there would be this political change that we needed,” says Kolbert on a recent phone call from Massachusetts. “That has not really happened.”
She adds, “Maybe it is happening now. We’ll see what happens over the next couple of years.”
Kolbert had long been interested in environmental issues. Back when she was a New York Times reporter, she occasionally wrote about the subject as it intersected with politics. But her extensive coverage of climate change began in 2005 with “The Climate of Man,” a three-part series for The New Yorker. In 2014, she published the book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History,” which would go to become a New York Times Bestseller and win the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction.
“The unfortunate fact is that we have spent the last 15 years not doing what we should have done, and that means that the task has become significantly more difficult when dealing with climate change,” says Kolbert.
Her most recent book, “Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future,” is a sequel of sorts to “The Sixth Extinction.” It is, as she writes, “a book about people trying to solve problems created by people trying to solve problems.” In it, Kolbert travels extensively, exploring rivers, desert pools and coral reefs while getting to know some of the people looking for solutions to the world’s climate change and biodiversity crises.
This points to something that has changed since Kolbert’s early days of covering climate change. Back in the early 2000s, she spent a good amount of time reporting from the Arctic and she edited a book of writing on it. “It was always predicted that the Arctic would see the effects of climate change first and most dramatically. That has turned out to be true,” she says. However, the impact of climate change has spread further since then. “Now, I could go anywhere — that’s certainly true of California — and I would find very robust data that would show me how climate change is impacting the world right now.”
It’s not exactly the change people would want to see. That, Kolbert says, is perhaps one of the lesser-known stories of the past decade-and-a-half. “A lot of these impacts that were predicted for some time in the future, they’re coming faster and more dramatically, as a general rule, than climate scientists would have predicted 15 years ago,” she says.
In one moving section of “Under a White Sky,” Kolbert writes about the pupfish of the Mojave Desert. Believed to be among the rarest fish in the world, the Devils Hole pupfish are found in a cavern pool about an hour or so outside of Las Vegas. The modern story of this desert oddity is as much about humans as it is about fish. Human interferences led to habitat degradation. Yet, for the past several decades, humans have worked, and often struggled, to save and replenish this tiny population of pupfish.
Kolbert visits both Devils Hole and a nearby replica of the pool. While the Devils Hole pupfish are Nevada residents, this story, like the Mojave, crosses state lines. In 1969, a California Department of Fish and Game biologist named Phil Pister moved the Owens pupfish from a shrinking pond near Bishop in two buckets. He recalled holding “the existence of an entire vertebrate species” in his hands. More recently, the Shoshone pupfish, named for the Inyo County town where they’re found, were rediscovered after perceived extinction. A local RV Park owner, Susan Sorrells, has helped revive the population, using a hot spring system to make pools for them.
As dire as the messages are in Kolbert’s work, there’s often a glimmer of hope. That’s certainly the case in the story of the pupfish. “I think that if there is anything hopeful out there, it is the work of people like Phil Pister, who really have devoted their lives to trying to either save something or improve something, leave the world better than they found it,” she says.
“I want people to be impressed by the severity of the problem and the scale of the problem, but it’s not really a viable option to give up and crawl under the bed,” says Kolbert. “So, I really do admire all of these people who are in the book, once again, trying their best.”
And, when it comes to tackling these human-made problems, all humans can do is try to alleviate them. “Whether it will work or not, we don’t know. They don’t know. That’s sort of part of the conditions right now,” says Kolbert. “We don’t even know whether it’s going to work or not, but we kind of have to try.”
