Over the last two decades, award-winning journalist and author Elizabeth Kolbert has traveled the globe, peppered top scientists with thoughtful questions and scrutinized research and media reports in one enterprising, unrelenting quest: to get to the heart of the debate over global warming.
One of the nation’s most prominent voices on climate change, Kolbert captured the Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, her 2014 book tracing the evolution of extinction and humanity’s reassembling of the biosphere. Her most recent book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, explores humans’ ongoing efforts to mitigate the damage they have inflicted on the planet. A national bestseller, Under a White Sky scored public praise from the likes of Barack Obama and Bill Gates while the Washington Post, TIME and Publishers Weekly are among those who named the title one of 2021’s top books.
Before visiting Northwestern University on October 12 to deliver the 33rd Annual Richard W. Leopold Lecture hosted by Weinberg College, Kolbert discussed her 21-year run investigating climate change, her mission with Under a White Sky and how her liberal arts education prepared her to examine one of the world’s most acute and universal problems.
What spurred you to investigate climate change in the first place?
This goes back to 2001 when I was new at The New Yorker and many of today’s college students weren’t even born. George W. Bush had just been elected president and withdrawn the U.S. from the Kyoto Protocol. I got this idea to, once and for all, determine the extent of climate change as a problem. I ended up going to Greenland and standing atop 10,000 feet of ice on the Greenland Ice Sheet. It was astonishing and I remember one of the Danish scientists with me saying, “We’re not picking up a climate change signal here yet, but the physics are impeccable. Climate change is here. There’s no arguing with it.” It was an eye-opening, life-altering experience and led to a three-part series for The New Yorker (“The Climate of Man”) that set me down this path.
While your first book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe, detailed the realities of global warming, The Sixth Extinction explored mankind’s role in altering the planet. How does Under a White Sky build off those previous works?
After I wrote The Sixth Extinction, I was interested in people’s response to how we might deal with these problems we’ve created. I traveled to Hawaii to write a piece about a project going on there called “assisted evolution,” in which scientists were assisting corals in adapting to climate change since they were not evolving fast enough on their own. I met a dynamic woman, the late marine biologist Ruth Gates, who was very eloquent on this subject of how we were going to have to tinker with nature to help it along. There was not going to be this “natural nature” anymore. That struck me and I started to see this pattern of humans tinkering again and again by imposing a new level of technology or a new level of intervention. That’s what set me off on writing Under a White Sky.
What’s the central question you’re exploring in Under a White Sky?
The big question is this pattern, this impulse of ours, to tinker. Are we creating a solution or rather another set of problems? Now, I don’t answer that question because I don’t have an answer and, in fact, I’d encourage some suspicion around those who do offer answers. Ours is a time of big questions and I hope to encourage people to think about this quest. If you can inform the way people look at the world, then maybe they will think more carefully about things and with greater reflection and more humility.
Under a White Sky is the product of your extensive travel, research and interviewing. Was there a particularly impactful experience you had during this project?
While interviewing Ruth Gates was the genesis of the project, I also visited a lab in Australia where they had genetically engineered toads. This was a window into the tremendous power of gene editing as a tool to potentially deal with problems and potentially create new problems. It raised the stakes.
Typically, when we gene-edit an organism, if they then mate with “a wild type,” the gene-edited variation dissipates in the population. Like anything else, it will only be inherited some of the time and eventually reach a low frequency, presumably because it becomes overwhelmed by these other genetic variations. But with what’s known as gene drive, which I talk about in Under a White Sky, a lab can overrule that. The lab can decide there’s a trait it wants everyone to inherit. In theory – and already in practice with some organisms – you can push that out into the world. That’s both very powerful and very dangerous. In fact, some of the people who were most enthusiastic about gene drive now say it’s really too dangerous to use. It’s like having keys to the kingdom. Do you want to trust this species called humans with those keys?
What’s behind the book’s title?
The title comes from the last chapter and an idea called solar geoengineering, which involves putting reflective particles into the stratosphere to counteract global warming. One of the side effects of that approach is changing the color of the sky, to make it whiter, and that isn’t something that fills most people’s hearts with joy.
Solar geoengineering is the ultimate example of the phenomenon I’m writing about in Under a White Sky. We’ve loaded up the atmosphere with carbon dioxide. We don’t know what to do, so one response is to load up the stratosphere with these reflective particles. It’s a controversial idea, of course, but it’s not going away because the problem isn’t going away.
The Washington Post called Under a White Sky “riveting and pessimistic.” Is that a fair assessment?
The Post really got the book. It’s a dark comedy, so yes, ultimately, it is pessimistic. These great technologies are not going to solve all of our problems, though one could read it that way. One of the book’s themes is that we’ve run out of easy answers, easy possibilities, and now there are only wrong answers as they say.
If there are only wrong answers, then where do we go from here?
We’re heading into dangerous times, which I do not see as a particularly radical statement. Things continue moving quite fast in terms of the climate and we’re not in control. Now, the question is: Will we act and do what’s necessary to minimize the damage? So far, the answer to that is not terribly comforting. We need to stop emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That’s the one clear answer here, but that’s easy to say and much more difficult to do.
How have you seen the dialogue around climate change shift over the last two decades?
Twenty years ago, climate change wasn’t really on people’s radar. The physicists and the geophysicists all realized it was coming down the pike, but the field scientists were somewhat skeptical because they weren’t seeing it in their data. Today, there’s near unanimity in the scientific community regarding climate change, the data’s clear and people are starting to feel the impacts of global warming in their own lives – though acknowledging humans’ role in this is a different story. And the news coverage has shifted, too. When I started out, there would be a story about some scientist relaying global warming research and then this coterie of contrarian scientists, many of whom it turned out were being paid by the oil industry, would offer some absurd, contradictory take. You don’t see that anymore, largely because journalists realized they were being played.
What’s on the docket for your Leopold Lecture?
I’ll be sharing some of the stories from the book, which I hope encourages people to look at what’s going on in a new way, to see this pattern and impulse of ours to fix the problems we created with new fixes that might or might not make things better. These are big questions before us and we better exercise caution and humility in our response.
What’s the importance of putting these questions before college students, in particular?
Students are going to be living with the consequences of a lot of poor decisions my generation made, so they should be as well informed as possible about what’s at stake here. We can’t run away from these problems.
You studied literature at Yale as an undergraduate. How did that liberal arts education prepare you and empower you to explore a complex and layered issue like climate change?
Studying literature was, on one level, not the right preparation for writing about science. On another, though, it was perfect because the liberal arts training compels you to ask a lot of questions and to resist easy answers. If someone offers you an easy answer, you should probably be skeptical of it. After all, if there were easy answers, we wouldn’t be in the fix we’re in right now.
More information and ticket information on Elizabeth Kolton’s upcoming public lecture:
The 33rd Annual Richard W. Leopold Lecture
Date: October 12, 2022
Time: 5pm CT
Location: Cahn Auditorium at Northwestern University.
Cost and Tickets: The event is free and open to the public. Reserve your tickets.