Life on a Little-Known Planet Dispatches from a Changing World

About this book

A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize-winning Elizabeth Kolbert's most important pieces about climate change and the natural world

Elizabeth Kolbert, one of our most influential writers on the environment and author of the seminal The Sixth Extinction, brings together her most urgent reporting and inspiring lessons from the frontlines of the climate catastrophe. We join Kolbert on the road as she travels to the corners of the earth most dramatically affected by climate change, revealing a world which is both dangerously fragile and remarkably resilient – from Greenland’s melting ice sheets and Utah’s shrinking lakes to New Zealand’s protected mountaintops and Europe’s regenerated plains. Along the way, we encounter newly discovered species and the last surviving members of others. We learn how to bring animals back from the brink of extinction. We see the power of rewilding up close and are reminded of the abounding wonders of our natural world.

We also meet countless brilliant and dedicated individuals who are steering us towards a better future: scientists harnessing AI to commune with whales; activists successfully lobbying for the rights of nature; and ordinary people making extraordinary moves, such as the Samsø islanders leading completely carbon-neutral lives.

The climate crisis is the defining challenge of our age. The natural world is changing profoundly, and the threats to our planet which Kolbert has spent her life exposing are only growing more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of this incredible world we are in danger of losing – and to act, while we still can.

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Biography

Elizabeth Kolbert is the author of the international bestseller The Sixth Extinction, for which she won the Pulitzer Prize, and Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.

She has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1999, and has been awarded the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children.