Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert is an American journalist and author best known for her science and environmental writing. She has been a staff writer at The New Yorker since 1999, where her reporting on climate change and the natural world has reached millions of readers. She graduated from Yale University and later studied at the University of Hamburg on a Fulbright Scholarship. Her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History (2014) explored the ongoing mass extinction event caused by human activity, weaving field reporting with scientific history. It won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction and became an international bestseller, credited with bringing the concept of a sixth mass extinction into mainstream public discourse. Kolbert's earlier book Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (2006) was one of the first popular works to comprehensively document the human dimensions of global warming. Her more recent Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (2021) examined geoengineering and extreme interventions in natural systems. She has received multiple National Magazine Awards and honorary degrees, and is widely regarded as one of the most important environmental journalists of her generation.