Addressing ‘The Sixth Extinction’

Elizabeth Kolbert meets with students in an environmental policy class, one of several classroom visits during her residency at Dickinson. Photo by Carl Socolow '77.

Elizabeth Kolbert meets with students in an environmental policy class, one of several classroom visits during her residency at Dickinson. Photo by Carl Socolow '77.

Elizabeth Kolbert Discusses Human Impact on the Planet

by Craig Layne

Dickinson will host a lecture by Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, who will discuss how human behavior is causing entire species to disappear from the planet. This free, public talk will take place Tuesday, Sept. 20, at 7 p.m. in Anita Tuvin Schlechter (ATS) Auditorium and will include a book signing. The event also will be available online via live-stream.

Kolbert is the 2016 recipient of The Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Walters Prize at Dickinson College for Global Environmental Activism, which was created to focus attention on the need to reduce the impact of human lives on the planet, particularly given the rising population predictions for this century.

Kolbert’s lecture will focus on her most recent book, The Sixth Extinction, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015. There is a scientific consensus that five previous mass extinctions have occurred over the past half-billion years. An asteroid impact about 65 million years ago caused the fifth extinction, which killed off the dinosaurs, Kolbert explained on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2014. “Now you’ll hear scientists say, we humans are the asteroid,” she said.

Growing out of her years of experience covering climate change for The New Yorker, where she has been a staff writer since 1999, Kolbert traveled from the Amazon to the Andes to provide anecdotes, examine research and dig into the history of extinction. She has an extensive background in writing about climate change. Her three-part series for The New Yorker on global warming, The Climate of Man, won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award and a National Academies communications award. Kolbert expanded the series into the book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner and has received a Heinz Award and Guggenheim Fellowship. Kolbert’s journalism career includes a stint with The New York Times, where she covered politics and media and contributed to The New York Times Magazine. Additionally, Kolbert is a visiting fellow at the Center for Environmental Studies at Williams College.

In addition to this lecture, Dickinson’s Rose-Walters Prize includes a short residency during which Kolbert will meet with Dickinson’s many student environmental-leadership groups and faculty and participate in class discussions. Previous recipients of Dickinson’s highest honor for environmental advocacy are award-winning actor and environmental activist Mark Ruffalo; author and environmental activist Bill McKibben; Apple’s vice president of environment, policy and social initiatives Lisa Jackson, who also served as Environmental Protection Agency administrator under President Barack Obama; and author and award-winning nature photographer James Balog.

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Published September 15, 2016