Elizabeth Kolbert (born July 6, 1961) is an American journalist, author, and visiting fellow at Williams College.
She is best known for her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, and as an observer and commentator on the environment for The New Yorker magazine.
The Sixth Extinction was a New York Times bestseller and won the Los Angeles Times' book prize for science and technology. Her book Under a White Sky was one of The Washington Post's ten best books of 2021. Kolbert is a two-time National Magazine Award winner, and in 2022 was awarded the BBVA Biophilia Award for Environmental Communication.
Her work has appeared in The Best American Science and Nature Writing and The Best American Essays.
Kolbert served as a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists' Science and Security Board from 2017 to 2020.
Early life
Kolbert spent her early childhood in the Bronx; her family then relocated to Larchmont, where she remained until 1979.
After graduating from Mamaroneck High School, Kolbert spent four years studying literature at Yale University. In 1983, she was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to study at Universität Hamburg, in Germany. Her brother, Dan Kolbert of Portland, Maine, is a well-known builder and author.
Career
Elizabeth Kolbert started working for The New York Times as a stringer in Germany in 1983. In 1985, she went to work for the Metro desk. Kolbert served as the Times' Albany bureau chief from 1988 to 1991 and wrote the Metro Matters column from 1997 to 1998.
Since 1999, she has been a staff writer for The New Yorker.
She was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for The Sixth Extinction in 2015.
Personal life
Kolbert resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband, John Kleiner, and three sons (Ned, Matthew, and Aaron).
Recognition
2005 American Association for the Advancement of Science Journalism Award
2006 National Magazine Award for Public Interest
2006 Lannan Literary Fellowship
2006 National Academies Communication Award
16th Annual Heinz Award with special focus on global change, 2010
2010 National Magazine Award for Commentary
2010 Guggenheim Fellowship in Science Writing
2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction
2016 Sam Rose '58 and Julie Walters Prize at Dickinson College for Environmental Activism 2017 SEAL Environmental Journalism Award Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2017.
Bibliography
Books
Essays and reporting
Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Waste Land" (review of Lina Zeldovich, The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health, University of Chicago Press, 259 pp.; and Jo Handelsman, A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet, Yale University Press, 262 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIX, no. 3 (24 February 2022), pp. 4, 6.
Elizabeth Kolbert, "A Trillion Little Pieces: How plastics are poisoning us", The New Yorker, 3 July 2023, pp. 24–27. "If much of contemporary life is wrapped up in plastic, and the result of this is that we are poisoning our kids, ourselves, and our ecosystems, then contemporary life may need to be rethought." (p. 27.) Elizabeth Kolbert, "Spored to Death" (review of Emily Monosson, Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic, Norton, 253 pp.; and Alison Pouliot, Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms: Forays with Fungi Across Hemispheres, University of Chicago Press, 278 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXX, no.14 (21 September 2023), pp. 41–42. "Fungi sicken us and fungi sustain us. In either case, we ignore them at our peril." (p. 42.) Elizabeth Kolbert, "Needful Things: The raw materials for the world we've built come at a cost" (largely based on Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization, Knopf, 2023; Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain; and Chip Colwell, So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything, Chicago), The New Yorker, 30 October 2023, pp. 20–23. Kolbert mainly discusses the importance to modern civilization, and the finite sources of, six raw materials: high-purity quartz (needed to produce silicon chips), sand, iron, copper, petroleum (which Conway lumps together with another fossil fuel, natural gas), and lithium. Kolbert summarizes archeologist Colwell's review of the evolution of technology, which has ended up giving the Global North a superabundance of "stuff," at an unsustainable cost to the world's environment and reserves of raw materials.