Dear Ms. Kolbert:
Your new book The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History is equal parts masterful and perplexing.
It’s a tour de force through the byways of species biology, full of fascinating scientists studying charismatic creatures that are passing or have passed into extinction. But your narration is weirdly dissociative—detached to the point that it might be diagnosable under DSM 5. You document the unfathomable holocaust of species we are unleashing on our planet with your usual New Yorker-caliber prose, but you seem unwilling to embrace and articulate the sheer scale of the tragedy you have detailed—or say aloud the moral implications of your reporting.
Writing about climate change in the 1980s turned your New Yorker predecessor Bill McKibben into a force of nature for climate action. That progression, I understand.
Yours, I don’t. I kept wanting you to tell me how you felt about it all. What did it feel like to be there in the dwindling rain forest, on the bleaching reef, in the cave of the bat pandemic, in the acidifying Mediterranean, learning directly from the world’s leading experts just how bad things are, extinction-wise? You tell the story in the first person and fill it with personalizing details about everything other than how it felt in your soul to spend months on end staring into the abyss of human-caused extinction: a future without Sumatran rhinos, spectacled bears, Hawai’in crows, or Orangutans. Orangutans! You tell us, in fact, that all our primate cousins are on a path to annihilation—a prospect so upsetting to me that I sat alone sobbing onto the pages as I read it. How did you cope with what you were learning?
Again and again, you tell us astonishing things, things that make my soul shudder: that Earth may now be in the process of losing two-thirds of its mammal species, half its birds, and similarly outsized shares of most other taxonomic groups; that during just the past three decades, amphibian species worldwide have been perishing faster than herpetologists can keep track of them (since my youngest son was born in 1994, dozens of frog species have died out entirely); that bats by the millions have vanished from the eastern United States just since 2007; that ocean acidification, climate change, and other insults are steadily eating at way the world’s coral reefs—they may have only 50 years left. In short, Ms. Kolbert, you have amply demonstrated that our world is dying, and that we are killing it.
Yet instead of penning a rallying cry, a Jeremiad, an End of Nature, Silent Spring, or Fate of the Earth for global extinction, you have written an existential shrug. It’s learned and informative and wry and sensitive. It is, in fact, incisively observant. You write, for example, about the likelihood that humans began causing extinction with our own cousins, the Neanderthals. You describe your visit to a scientist who is piecing together the Neanderthal genome, then provide just about the best one-sentence summation of human nature I have ever read. We are, you say, “the sort of creature that could wipe out its nearest relative, then dig up its bones and reassemble its genome.” Elizabeth Kolbert, how does your brain generate such brilliant sentences?!
But, also, Ms. Kolbert, how can you write an entire book about one of the greatest tragedies of all human existence, one that we are accelerating right now, and never once say we should mobilize to stop it?
Your incredulous admirer,
Alan Durning
Michael Foster
Thank you for this piece. I had the exact same response when I saw her at Town Hall. So anxious and uncomfortable telling us what she really thought, avoiding opinion, and clearly beyond hope for humanity.
I wanted to give her a shoulder to cry on if only she would use it. And to give her a plan, a group like Plant-For-The-Planet, to inspire her to act.
Crazy times. There is no hope. Only action and despair. For 99% of people who don’t know what to do (–recycle!) despair can take on strange forms. Like traveling to see the melting glaciers or writing a book about it.
Thank you for giving voice to this need to do something to confront the senseless loss of everything we love.
Alan Durning
Thanks for your comment, Michael. I’ve thought a little more about this. My main disappointment was actually not in the absence of a call to action, though I wanted that. My main disappointment was that she didn’t say how it felt. Doing either would have helped. Doing both would have made me her acolyte for life.
Elona
Can someone please arrange a meeting between Elizabeth Kolbert and Joanna Macy?
Alan Durning
Exactly!
trishka
i wonder if maybe she hasn’t shut down her feelings to a large extent, in order to do the reporting work she does? i may be projecting, because i simply do not allow myself to feel the scale of the horror on an emotional level, for fear of debilitation and thus not being able to act.
it’s just a thought. she may be no expressing her feelings because she can’t – if she went there they might be too big for her to cope with and then where would her book be? we wouldn’t have the information she is sharing.
bill b
i have a friend that did climate and oceans reporting for Mother Jones and National Geographic. the toll on her psyche and health was painful to watch.
richard pauli
Excellent comment.
Perhaps we are not to be included as mammals.
Some of us prefer illusion to despair.
Larry Daloz
I have long admired Elizabeth Kolbert for her writing on climate disruption and share Durning’s dismay. “Existential shrug” is an apt term, and a tragic one. And though her apparent resignation may be a necessary defense, we are not doomed to a fundamentalistic choice between “illusion” and “despair.” There is a third way.
At the Whidbey Institute’s first climate conference last April, Sightline’s Anna Fahey invoked Shaun Chamberlain’s term, “dark optimism” to call for a capacity to look clear-eyed into the looming tragedy of climate disruption, to grieve its reality, perhaps rage at its injustice, to swallow its bitterness, and then to work steadily to address it because, in fact, we have no other choice if we are to retain our humanity.
This coming April, a second annual invitational gathering of Cascadia climate leaders will take that challenge deeper, focusing on the moral, ethical, and emotional dimensions of climate disruption. Speakers include Kathleen Deane Moore, KC Golden, Alec Loorz, Renee Lertzman, and others.
Kathleen Deane Moore will be delivering an address on the topic open to the public on Saturday evening, April 12. For details see the Whidbey Institute website.
We will be capturing the conference in a video and further materials will be available from the Whidbey Institute for those interested. We may not know what the future will bring, but we do know that we are not alone. There is power in unity.
Mark Huddleston
Perhaps you could invite Ms. Kolbert to the Whidbey Institute’s Climate Conference or other such gatherings in the future (probably too late for this year’s). No doubt it would be a healing, rejuvenating time for her, one that would serve her, and us, well into the future.
I’d also be curious to hear if there’s been any response by her to Alan’s excellent letter.
Thanks to Alan, Larry, and all the rest of you at Sightline and the Institute for the wonderful work you’re doing on behalf of our planet.
Robert Dickens Sr.
Why is only the Middle class and the Poor worried about our killing of a planet that we all live on? Do the 1% have another planet to go to we don’t know about? Why don’t they care about these things over profit? And they are the smart” so called Job Creators..
niall dunne
I suppose it depends on how you define the task of a journalist – particularly one who reports on science. Ms. Kolbert may think that her priority is to present the facts, and that interjecting her feelings about said facts may compromise them in some way. (And as a woman journalist, she may be especially sensitive about leaving herself open to accusations of “hysteria,” etc. – a la Rachel Carson back in day.) I don’t doubt Ms. Kolbert feels sad about the sixth extinction, as many of us do, and have been doing for years now. But should she have to communicate her sadness in order to connect readers with the tragedy of what’s occurring? To me, that’d be pretty sad too.
Rachael Pecore-Valdez
Thank you all for this discussion! Just the fact that it is a discussion gives me hope.
I often wonder what it will take to wake myself up to full-on action, what would giving planet earth my all look like?
I imagine myself standing up and walking outside, one foot in front of the other, and walking with a flag to recognize a local species. Salmon, lamprey, gray whales… wolf OR-7. This idea has turned into an expedition, the Wolf OR-7 Expedition, and I have no idea what good it will or won’t do, but it feels good to do something. Anything. To stand up and walk, one step at a time.
For wild peace,
Rachael