Regeneration Talk: Elizabeth Kolbert

It is said that we live in a new geological epoch characterized by climate change and other disastrous human impacts on the planet. In her new book, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Elizabeth Kolbert takes a hard look at the new world we are creating. Should we be seeking technological solutions to the damage humans have caused to the environment, or will such “solutions” only make the problems worse?

Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker. Her book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History, an examination of mass extinctions that weaves intellectual and natural history with reporting in the field, was a New York Times 2014 Top Ten Best Book of the Year and is number one on the Guardian‘s list of the 100 Best Nonfiction Books of all time. The Sixth Extinction also won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize in the General Nonfiction category and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle awards for the best books of 2014. Growing out of a groundbreaking three-part series in The New Yorker, her first book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year (2006) by The New York Times Book Review.

Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. Her journalism has garnered numerous awards, including the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine award, the National Academy of Sciences Communication Award in the newspaper/magazine category, and a National Magazine Award in the Reviews and Criticism category. Kolbert has also been awarded a Lannan Writing Fellowship, the prestigious Heinz Award, the Sierra Club’s David R. Brower Award, the Walter Sullivan Award for Excellence in Science Journalism from the American Geophysical Union, and the Blake-Dodd Prize from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In March 2021 she was voted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Copies of Kolbert’s books will be available for purchase and signing, courtesy of Chaucer’s Books. This will event will be held in person; there will not be live or recorded online viewing options.

Sponsored by the IHC’s Regeneration series and the IHC Idee Levitan Endowment

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