Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist and author who has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999. Before joining the magazine, she worked at The New York Times as an Albany bureau chief and writer of the Metro Matters column. Her earlier environmental reporting includes Field Notes from a Catastrophe, a book about climate change.

Kolbert writes reported nonfiction at the meeting point of science, natural history and public policy. She travels with researchers, visits damaged or engineered landscapes and makes large planetary changes legible through concrete encounters. Her recurring subject is human power: how one species has altered the climate, moved organisms across continents and pushed other forms of life toward disappearance.

The Sixth Extinction follows scientists studying an unfolding biodiversity crisis, from Panamanian golden frogs threatened by chytrid fungus to corals on the Great Barrier Reef. It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Under a White Sky turns from destruction to attempted repair, reporting on interventions such as preserving the Devils Hole pupfish, turning carbon dioxide into stone in Iceland and developing heat-tolerant coral.

Start with The Sixth Extinction. Its combination of field reporting, scientific history and species-level stories offers the clearest introduction to Kolbert’s central concerns. Under a White Sky is the natural follow-up, asking what happens when technological intervention becomes the proposed remedy for damage caused by earlier interventions.