Elizabeth Kolbert has been an unflinching chronicler of climate change at The New Yorker magazine for years, writing with a steady, understated tone that lets each alarming fact speak for itself. Her engrossing new book, The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, expands her reporting on the catastrophic effects of global warming, balancing compelling historical background with first-hand observations from a variety of troubled vantage points around the world. It's surprisingly difficult to put down—at once sweeping and sharply focused in its examination of our current grim crossroads, the book manages to be upsetting and disturbing without sinking into despair.
"With her usual lucid and lovely prose, Elizabeth Kolbert lays out the sad and gripping facts of our moment on earth: that we’ve become a geological force, driving vast swaths of creation over the brink," writes Bill McKibben. "A remarkable addition to the literature of our haunted epoch." Last week we spoke with Kolbert about her book via phone from her home in Western Massachusetts.
One fascinating thing I learned from The Sixth Extinction is that this isn't the first time climate change has caused a mass extinction. Some of the causes of these events are still pretty obscure, but it seems the best explanation for the first mass extinction seems to be very severe climate change in the opposite direction from the way we're changing the climate. A cold event. And the best explanation for the worst mass extinction of all time was a very, very severe episode of global warming, ocean acidification, and ocean anoxia, too, which is where the oceans have no oxygen in various layers. They become very stratified, and a lot of the oceans would just be what we call "Dead Zones." That's a very sobering parallel. Anyone who doesn't find that sobering really ought to think again, because that is what we're doing. We're putting a lot of CO2 up there, and it seems pretty clear that event was at least associated with CO2.
And which period did that end? It ended the Paleozoic Era. So it not only ended a period, it ended an era, which are these big, big divisions in the history of life. And it was the worst mass extinction of all time. There's a book about it called When Life Nearly Died. It got very close to eliminating multi-cellular life.
Wow. Yeah, that was about to two hundred and fifty - two hundred million years ago. And there's a lot of interest in it right now, because of some of these pretty scary parallels.
And in addition to the parallels, one of the differences is how rapidly climate is changing in our time, as opposed to this previous event. Is that right? Well, it's really difficult to figure out how fast something happened when it happened two hundred million years old. But a pretty recent paper suggests that the carbon being released at that time was being released at a pretty comparable rate to what we're doing now, but it lasted a longer time, presumably. We don't know how long ours will last! But it wasn't an event that occurred over centuries, it was an event that occurred over millennia, let's say.
Is there a main theory about what released all of the carbon? Well yeah, the big theory is this huge volcanic event—not a volcano like Mount St. Helens that we're familiar with— but sometimes these huge magma plumes vent to the Earth's surface. A lot of Siberia is actually covered with lava from this event. It created what's called an igneous province, which is a large geological phenomenon. It's very interesting, they don't happen very often but when they do there's this idea that maybe they could have released [the carbon]. Though, to be honest, people have trouble trying to figure out how it could have released so much carbon.
However it happened, the effects echo what is happening now. Yes, exactly. You release a lot of carbon into the air and there are two things you can be pretty confident are going to happen. One, you are going to warm up the planet, and two, you're going to acidify the ocean, if you do it rapidly. And both of those things very clearly happened in the end-Permian extinction, and both of those things are very clearly happening now. So those are not happy parallels. Now, other things also happened in the end-Permian. Like I said, you got these big Dead Zones in the ocean with no oxygen. And that is something that you can't rule out from what we're doing.
That these dead zones will be a result of our carbon emissions? Yes. It depends on how long you continue this and how much you heat up the planet, but eventually you could get to the point where what happens is the oceans don't turn over. They're pretty well mixed, but if you heat up the surface of the ocean a lot, then the oceans don't turn over, so they get very stratified. And you can get big regions of depth that don't get any oxygen. We do have Dead Zones now. They're increasing for different reasons that have to do with fertilizer use, but it's something that people would say is not in the immediate future. But it is not something you would want to get to.
In the bio at the end of the book it's revealed that you have children, and it just made me wonder what future you see for them. Maybe you don't want to speculate, but do you think the human species is even going to make it? Will there be anything for your children? I think there is a long way to go between the human species "not making it," and there being a lot of disruptions to our society. Will there be events in my kids' lifetime or in my own lifetime that will be very socially disruptive because of environmental change and environmental degradation? I unfortunately think it's quite possible. But there's a long way to go between that and the end of the human race.
So you write this powerful book that is very profound, and I think part of the intention of this book is to educate people about these problems. So after they get to the final page, what would you suggest they do? [Laughs] Ah, that is such a good question isn't it? I very consciously didn't give them the "ten things that you ought to do." I know that there is a very big appetite for that. And I know there are some people who are annoyed or disappointed by that. But I hope what I have conveyed is a really, really "Big Issue Problem" with multiple drivers, and it is not something that you, as an individual, are going to solve by anything you do. I do hope it will bring these issues into awareness and get people thinking about how we might minimize our impact as opposed to maximizing it, which is pretty much what we're doing now.
Toward the end of the book you reference some proposals that others have made, that the solution to climate change may lay in colonies on Mars or the moon. What do you think of that? I'm not too optimistic about that, let's just put it that way. If you're a species that can't make it on your own, on your home planet, because you trashed it, and your home planet has many advantages, like life and oxygen and things like that, which turn out to be really handy, and you think you're going to make it on some other planet... When you lay out those two possibilities it just doesn't seem to add up.
Oh, well. [Laughs] Sorry about that! I know a lot of people are hoping for that.
The book is very much based in scientific research, it's heavily footnoted, and yet as I was reading it I kept asking myself these metaphysical questions, like, "As a species, has it been our role or our destiny to destroy life on Earth? Did we come into being for this purpose, like some kind of virus destined to eradicate everything?" Is that something that has occurred to you? I definitely think that the big question at the center of the book is "What does it mean to be human? What role do we play? What role are we going to play?" I think it's certainly clear that, unconsciously, we, without meaning to, we—and our pretty distant ancestors—have done in a lot of other creatures. And the question of consciousness and whether we can bring ourselves to think about these things. And after having done that, can we do something about it? These are really the questions of our time, and it's only going to become more and more apparent, unfortunately.
And what do you think? Can we deal with this? I certainly think that we are probably destined to do a good amount of damage. Whether we can arrest ourselves—or whether we are arrested by the forces of ecology—from doing a tremendous amount of damage... I don't know, I just honestly don't know.
There is that hopeful fact you cite in your book about the chemist [Paul Crutzen] who discovered Chlorofluorocarbons' damage to the ozone layer. That is a very hopeful example, and efforts to deal with global warming are very much modeled on that, like, 'Look, we identified a problem and identified that we're going to have to phase these things out.' And we basically have. There are still problems, but we haven't created the utter chaos that we could have. And unfortunately that hasn't happened in regard to carbon emissions. And will it? I can imagine that it will, at the point when there is an alternative that people find acceptable. And that's maybe a technological breakthrough. Will it happen fast enough? That's a question that's really hard to answer.
Have you read anything about any possible technological breakthrough that may be an option? To completely ween us from fossil fuels? You know, people always talk about fusion, people talk about safer nuclear plants, solar... I guess the most hopeful thing I could point to is that the cost of solar panelling has been plummeting in recent years, even in parts of the world that aren't particularly sunny. For example, in our house, we supply all of our electricity with not that many solar panels. And since I put them on the roof, the cost has come down to about half of when I put them up. And I think if that becomes attractive to enough people it would make a significant difference.
There's this whole attack machine fueled by wealthy conservatives and climate change deniers. Have you faced any of these attacks? Have these people denounced the book? Yeah, I'm almost...The short answer is no, really. Probably because I'm not a big enough fish to fry, really. They tend to go after certain people, for whatever reason, whom they consider threatening. I guess I'm not threatening enough... I know, I'm a little bit offended really.
How long did you spend on this book and did you end up where you thought would? I started, in a manner of speaking, five years ago when I went to Panama to write a piece for The New Yorker, which is the first chapter.
About all the frogs dying. Right, exactly. But I didn't really say, "Well, this is a book " for nine months, or longer than that, but anyway, I spent more than four years. And I did end up more or less where I started, but only after I had taken many, many wrong turns along the way.
What are some of the things that most surprised you when working on it? You know, I'm not a naturalist and I haven't spent that much time out in the field. So I was sort of blown away by the amazing things you see, like when you go to the Great Barrier Reef or the Amazon or the Cloud Forest. For those of us who live in the temperate zones and are not familiar with how extraordinary life is in the tropics, I was kind of blown away by that. I spent a lot of time in the Arctic doing climate change stuff and I fell in love with the tropics, as many, many people before me have.
What do you have going on next? What's on the horizon? Yeah, that's a good question. I don't know. I'm in recovery.
You're probably still going on book tours and things of that nature, right? Well, that's kind of winding down. I have a job; I've been on book leave for a long time from The New Yorker. Now I've gotta get back to work. So that's really what I'm focused on right now. Whether there is another book out there, I am thinking about it. How's that?
That's good. So in traveling the country doing this, what was your sense of where America is at on all these alarming facts? You know, I would say I was really surprised and sort of gratified by the response to the book. I've gotten a much better response than I anticipated. I think that a lot of people sense, "Okay, wow, something pretty big is going on." And I tried to bring that together in a way that is readable and comprehensible to people who are not scientists themselves, and I think for a lot of people it did speak to something they are concerned about. But, you always have the issue of preaching to the choir.
They should make a movie out of it. It worked for The Orchid Thief. Just get this to Charlie Kaufman, he could do something with this. [Laughs] You know, Charlie has not called, sadly.
