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Over the last three decades, Elizabeth Kolbert (New York, 1961) has become “one of the most distinguished and influential environmental journalists of her generation,” in the words of the committee bestowing the 4th Biophilia Award for Environmental Communication, thanks to the “exceptional quality” of her articles, appearing primarily in The New Yorker, and the international impact of her books dealing with the global environmental crisis.
In the first stage of her career, at The New York Times (1984-1999), Kolbert covered mainly politics. It was not until 2001, when she joined the staff at The New Yorker magazine, that she began taking an interest in climate change after President George W. Bush decided to take the U.S. out of the Kyoto Protocol. There and then she resolved to write a series of articles looking in depth at the problem and, to this end, traveled to Greenland accompanying a group of scientists who were studying the ice melt triggered by global warming. The experience would change the course of her professional life.
This first series of articles on climate change – for which she visited other spots, like Iceland and Alaska, where the warming process was taking hold – would eventually be written up in her first book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe (2006).
Kolbert would later explore the issue of biodiversity loss in her internationally acclaimed book The Sixth Extinction (2014), translated into over 20 languages and winner of a Pulitzer Prize. To gather her material, she interviewed some of the world’s top experts chronicling biodiversity losses worldwide, frequently accompanying them into the field: botanists studying deforestation and habitat fragmentation in Amazonia, marine biologists documenting the degradation of the Great Barrier Reef, and ecologists observing all kinds of species teetering on the brink, from the Panamian golden frog to the Sumatran rhino.
In her latest book, Under a White Sky, published in 2021, Kolbert takes an in- depth look at some of the most advanced (and at times outlandish) technological fixes being mooted to confront the unfolding environmental crisis and undo humanity’s destructive impact on nature. To document it, she again traveled half the world to converse on the ground with the researchers developing some of these ambitious projects, from the injection of CO2 from the air into volcanic rocks to convert it into stone to the application of genetic engineering to revive extinct species.
Elizabeth Kolbert’s work, said the committee granting her the 4th Biophilia Award, exemplifies how specialized journalism can reach out to a wide global audience, persuading them of the need to confront the great environmental challenges through engaging stories grounded in the best scientific knowledge.