U.S. journalist and writer Elizabeth Kolbert received the BBVA Foundation’s 4th Biophilia Award for Environmental Communication in September 2022, in recognition of “her extraordinary ability to communicate in a rigorous and engaging manner the fundamental environmental challenges of our time, climate change and the biodiversity crisis, to a wide global audience,” in the words of the committee’s citation. On March 30, Kolbert will be formally presented with her award at a ceremony during which she will set out her vision of the challenges facing the global environment in a lecture titled “Man in the Anthropocene.”
Kolbert – an environmental journalist with The New Yorker and author of the book The Sixth Extinction, winner of a 2015 Pulitzer Prize, will explore what she describes as “this extraordinary moment in Earth’s history, which geologists have dubbed the Anthropocene. An epoch in which a single species – our own – is now the dominant force on the planet, rivalling what used to be called the great forces of nature.”
How are we humans changing the planet? What are the impacts of these changes? And what lies ahead, both for ourselves and for other species? Kolbert will address these vital questions at her lecture in the Marqués de Salamanca Palace, Madrid headquarters of the BBVA Foundation, after receiving her Biophilia Award.
