Journalist, Environmental Author
Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist and author who has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. Her Pulitzer Prize winning book The Sixth Extinction examined how human activity is driving a mass extinction event on par with the one that ended the age of the dinosaurs. Her subsequent work Under a White Sky explored the often paradoxical ways humans are intervening in nature to try to save it.
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Kolbert documents how human activity is driving a mass extinction event comparable to the asteroid that killed the dinosaurs. Species are vanishing at a rate not seen in 65 million years, and we are the cause.
by Elizabeth Kolbert
Kolbert investigates humanity's increasingly radical interventions in nature, from gene-editing coral to survive warming oceans to schemes to dim the sun. A probing examination of whether the same ingenuity that created the climate crisis can now save us from it.
The books Elizabeth Kolbert references, cites, and recommends most frequently.
by Richard Dawkins
Dawkins reframes evolution from the organism's perspective to the gene's. Bodies are survival machines built by genes competing to replicate - a view that transformed modern biology.
by Rachel Carson
Carson's 1962 expose revealed how pesticides were silently poisoning ecosystems and human health. The book launched the modern environmental movement and led to the DDT ban.
by Jared Diamond
Diamond investigates why some societies collapse while others endure, tracing destruction to environmental damage and failed group decision-making. The past warns the present.
by Merlin Sheldrake
Sheldrake reveals fungi as hidden architects of life, decomposing, connecting, and reshaping ecosystems in ways science barely grasps. Mycelial networks challenge our notion of individuality.
Who Elizabeth draws from, and who draws from Elizabeth — aggregated across every book in this collection. Counts show the number of citation links, not the depth of each one.