How to Make People Want to Read About Climate Change
On a reporting trip in July 2023, science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert had an “amazing” stroke of luck. It was her last day in Dominica, in the Caribbean, where she’d been shadowing a group of scientists attempting to translate sperm whale vocalizations with the help of artificial intelligence. While out at sea, she and the research […]
On a reporting trip in July 2023, science journalist Elizabeth Kolbert had an “amazing” stroke of luck. It was her last day in Dominica, in the Caribbean, where she’d been shadowing a group of scientists attempting to translate sperm whale vocalizations with the help of artificial intelligence.
While out at sea, she and the research crew witnessed the birth of a sperm whale calf, a dramatic scene which Kolbert described in a piece for the New Yorker as “something out of a marine-mammal Lord of the Rings.” She watched from a boat as dozens of pilot whales and more than 40 Fraser’s dolphins flocked to the area—an event the scientists are still working to understand.
For Kolbert, it was a blessing from the reporting gods. Before going into the field, the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sixth Extinction says she typically has “a pretty good idea” of what she’s hoping to get. “And sometimes, honestly, you get lucky beyond all belief.”
“To the extent that sperm whales have languages and dialects, probably a lot of them have been lost already.”
The spontaneous whale birth wasn’t Kolbert’s first fortuitous reporting event. Her new book, Life on a Little-Known Planet, a collection of long-form articles published over the last two decades, mostly in the New Yorker, is full of adventures, both big and small. It opens with her trip to Dominica, followed by 16 other stories: an entomologist working to document caterpillar species amid the “insect apocalypse,” famed climate scientist James Hansen protesting for climate action (way back in 2009), and a moving interview with Marie Smith Jones, the last fluent speaker of Eyak, one of Alaska’s Indigenous languages.
With a topic as broad, technical—and let’s be honest, doomsy—as climate change is, Life on a Little-Known Planet is a master class in how to write about our changing world. Ahead of the book’s release, I spoke with Kolbert about what she’s learned in her 25 or so years covering the environment, writing outside of the human perspective, and her legacy (Life on a Little-Known Planet isn’t a “swan song,” she tells me; Kolbert has no plans to slow down, and another book, about the ice ages, is on the way).
This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.
In the introduction of the book, you write about how the collection is animated by “irony”: As you note, biologist E.O. Wilson once wrote, the “ultimate irony of organic evolution” is that as we advance our understanding of the world, we’ve also become more destructive. Why did that theme speak to you?
A lot of the pieces in the book are about people who are out there doing cutting-edge research. The first piece in the book, for example, is about researchers who are using machine learning and artificial intelligence to try to decode the communications of sperm whales. And so that’s really—
—So cool.
Totally cool, totally fascinating, totally cutting edge. Meanwhile, the sperm whale population has been decimated. To the extent that sperm whales have languages and dialects, probably a lot of them have been lost already.
We are in this situation where we’re racing to collect knowledge. That’s the very explicit point of the title piece of the book, Life on a Little-Known Planet, which is about a researcher who’s trying to collect and document caterpillars before they’re gone—literally before you won’t be able to find them. That race between knowledge and obliteration is really one of the through lines of the book.
I noticed that you often employ non-human viewpoints. For instance, in the caterpillar piece, you write:
From a caterpillar’s perspective, humans are boring. The young they squeeze out of their bodies are just miniature versions of themselves, with all the limbs and appendages they’ll ever have. As they mature, babies get bigger and stronger and hairier, but that’s about it.
Caterpillars, for their part, are continually reinventing themselves…
…which is wonderful. What made you think this way?
I don’t want to claim anything particularly unique here. I think that whenever you write about another species, and really think about and spend a lot of time, as I did with caterpillars for that piece, you come to an appreciation of how remarkable—how they have their own form of brilliance.
“Being a human is just one way of being in the world.”
It’s also trying to enter into what the world would look like through their eyes, as it were. Now, obviously, they probably can’t even see us. They have pretty poor eyesight. But [I’m] trying to convey how being a human is just one way of being in the world.
That is something that in 2025, we really do not pay nearly as much attention to as we should. We’re very, very involved in other people. Many of us have very little interaction—besides with the ants that we sometimes find in our cabinets—with other species. And that distinguishes us very clearly from our ancestors, who had to be very in tune with other species because they relied on them. I think that alienation from the natural world is part of why we’re in the mess we’re in.
One of the pieces you include is a 2009 profile of the “father of global warming,” climate scientist James Hansen. At the time, you wrote that CO2 levels were around 385 parts per million. Today, they’re around 425 parts per million.
The piece is in large part about Hansen’s efforts to spark political action. More than 15 years later, it was quite a sad read, knowing how little progress we’ve made. Do you feel that some of these older pieces might have a different meaning 15, 20 years later?
Definitely. James Hansen was really out there trying—protesting on the streets, getting arrested—to draw attention to the urgency of the problem. There’s a piece about Christiana Figueres, who led the UN body that was trying to craft the Paris Agreement, which was done in what seemed to be a more hopeful moment.
There have been a lot of heroic people who have thrown their lives into trying to get the world to pay attention. To the extent that the book recognizes those efforts, I’m glad of that. But rereading them now, there is something of an elegiac quality.
It seems in this particular moment, when we’re tossing away—not just not making progress—but the US government actively undermining progress on climate change, it comes across as tragic.
How do you think about your own role in telling environmental stories? Do you think of yourself as an environmental advocate or activist?
I would call myself a journalist. And I’m a pretty old-school journalist. I have written these pieces in the spirit of hoping to be true to my subjects. Sometimes they’re people, sometimes they’re creatures.
Now that being said, obviously, by choosing to focus on a certain set of issues, a certain set of people—I wasn’t out there profiling climate deniers. So you could argue that is a form of advocacy, and if that is an argument that people want to make, I’m happy to accept that.
Many of these pieces are profiles, or have elements of profile writing—the reader always has a sense of what’s driving your characters. Do you find that it’s easier to connect a topic like climate change when it’s through the eyes of a compelling character?
In the kind of reported pieces I do, it’s often someone who drives the narrative forward, whom you can move through time and space with. So usually I am looking for, if not a central character as a profile, someone with a strong voice.
I think a lot of science journalists struggle to make climate stories compelling. It’s a lot of doom and gloom. So, asking for a friend here—in the 25 years or so of covering climate change, what have you learned?
One thing I’ve been incredibly fortunate to do is go to interesting places. Unfortunately, this requires having a news organization behind you, and carries a certain carbon footprint—I want to acknowledge that.
“In a geological sense, really big things are happening right now. I think it’s important that there be a record.”
With climate change [reporting], it seems to me you might have a very dramatic, interesting situation, a very interesting person, or an interesting place. And I think you often need two out of those three, and that usually means getting yourself somewhere.
For reporters in a certain market or [location], it’s harder because you can’t just get up and say, “Okay, that’s where something interesting is happening,” [and go]. It is difficult.
I know you’re not done yet—you have more to write. But in compiling this book, did you think about your legacy at all? In 100 years, how do you hope people will view your work?
In general, I see my work, as I say, not as advocacy, but as an attempt to get at what is going on. I hope that if there’s anyone reading [my work] 100 years from now, they will know where we were at this moment in time, 2025, let’s just say. I hope that has a value.
And I hope it has a value even for people in 2025. In a geological sense, really big things are happening right now. And I think it’s important that there be a record, and I hope to be participating in that.
Is there anything else about the book that you’re hoping people take away?
One thing I want to say is, I often write about grim topics, but I hope that there’s a certain pleasure in the stories. Many of them were a lot of fun to write, even if the topic was not the happiest. I hope that comes through.
