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"  When a fire alarm bleats repeatedly in the lobby of the Algonquin Hotel, where I&amp;#039;m talking to The New Yorker environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert about her new book, The Sixth Extinction, she keeps talking. She doesn&amp;#039;t pause as she lays out a detailed description of climate change, mass extinction, and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet, nor as she shifts seamlessly from musing about which animals might have roamed Manhattan 10 million years ago to the carbon impact of driving her twin 15-year-old sons to soccer. As we&amp;#039;re escorted to our table for lunch, a deafening announcement apologizes for the multiple interruptions. Lucky that we didn&amp;#039;t have to decamp to the sidewalk, I say. &amp;quot;I missed it,&amp;quot; Kolbert responds, her gray-blue eyes widening. &amp;quot;How did you hear the alarm going off?&amp;quot; Related: The Secret To Unleashing Your Creativity in 2014 It&amp;#039;s an unseasonably cold late fall day\u2014the kind of weather to set climate-change skeptics muttering about Al Gore&amp;#039;s big mistake\u2014and Kolbert is dressed sensibly for it, in black jeans, top, boots, and parka. Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, her 2006 book, established her as one of the foremost voices on the topic in the U.S. Most writing on climate change heaps on the bad news, before cutting it with a sprinkling of sugar, along the lines of, &amp;quot;But we can change the outcome, and this is what you should do now.&amp;quot; Kolbert, who in person is intense, and intensely curious, with an extremely dry wit, stands out because she neither panders nor polemicizes. She lets the facts speak for themselves, and rather than being relentlessly depressing (though it&amp;#039;s not not depressing), her matter-of-fact accounting of how little humans are willing to change to protect species other than their own is surprisingly refreshing. Related: Erin Andrews Talks Double Standards in Football Surprising, to me at least, because I&amp;#039;m both an avid nature lover and a global-warming phobe: I find it literally unbearable to contemplate what is really going on with the planet. My own affinity for animals developed through bird-watching with the man who eventually became my husband. When he landed his dream job at a prominent environmental group, the avocation expanded to shape our whole lives. It&amp;#039;s not a stretch to say that today fracking, the eating habits of snowy owls, and how stink bugs got to our house from China are common pillow talk for us. Yet I&amp;#039;ve long avoided exposing myself to some of the most direct reporting about the impact of climate change\u2014I felt sick to my stomach when I first opened Kolbert&amp;#039;s book\u2014and my husband knows the nature-documentary section of our DVR is his alone, because I usually wind up running from the room screaming or crying. I couldn&amp;#039;t help but wonder if, despite the coolness in her writing, I&amp;#039;d see some of my despair mirrored by Kolbert in our conversation. Not to put too fine of a point on it, but how does a global-warming reporter sleep at night? Her passion for nature, Kolbert says, is a legacy of childhood trips out West with her parents. She didn&amp;#039;t turn her professional focus to the environment, however, until 2001, after the U.S. withdrew from the Kyoto climate protocol, an international agreement intended to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Having just begun at The New Yorker following a 15-year stint covering politics for The New York Times, Kolbert saw a chance to settle &amp;quot;once and for all&amp;quot; the question about climate change: &amp;quot;Even as a pretty informed person, it was hard to know if it was a big thing or not.&amp;quot;  Catastrophe came down convincingly on the side of big thing, but the causes and effects of climate change are multiple and evolving, and Kolbert knows the topic can inspire an off-putting combination of fear and fatalism. So she&amp;#039;s always looking for a new way in, the story she&amp;#039;d want to read, which was how she arrived at extinction. &amp;quot;You get drawn to what&amp;#039;s interesting,&amp;quot; \u2028she says, &amp;quot;and I&amp;#039;ve tried to give people a sense of how amazing the world is.&amp;quot; The Sixth Extinction more than delivers on that front. Kolbert, who traveled in excess of 50,000 miles to experience in person what she writes about in her book, takes us to Paris to see and touch the knobby, brick-size molar of a mastodon, found in the Ohio River Valley in 1739 by French soldiers. It was one of the earliest pieces of the puzzle that led us to understand what was then a new and controversial idea: that there might have once been species on the earth that no longer existed. We visit the father-and-son scientific team the Alvarezes, whose work at Berkeley in the 1970s and &amp;#039;80s first proposed the sudden (rather than slow) extinction of the dinosaurs via a giant meteor, which also completely transformed the climate. We travel with her to the Great Barrier Reef, which she says is the place, &amp;quot;of all the places in the world,&amp;quot; that she&amp;#039;d love to return to (&amp;quot;though it&amp;#039;s an absurd expense of carbon&amp;quot;).  To be clear, over very long periods of time, some species go extinct naturally, while others evolve, and new ones emerge. But today, Kolbert and others argue, the environment is changing so rapidly and so massively that the avenues of survival that species might have used in the past are failing. For instance, in the Brazilian Amazon, Kolbert reports that researchers have found that certain birds are &amp;quot;extremely reluctant&amp;quot; to cross roads and are thus left to perish in inhospitable areas. The icing on the cake, or maybe the nail in the coffin, is the way organisms travel around the world with people and cargo, causing severe disruption to local ecosystems. This is what destroyed the golden frogs of Panama; they were victims of a deadly waterborne fungus that migrated with frogs sold for pets, food, or use in research. &amp;quot;Part of what we value in being human is we&amp;#039;re very creative and clever,&amp;quot; Kolbert says. &amp;quot;But it just turns out that when you bring that into contact with things that are evolving very, very slowly, there&amp;#039;s a mismatch. And global travel, trade\u2014they aren&amp;#039;t evil, or selfish, or greedy. They&amp;#039;re just things we did out of many of our good qualities. And that is one of the amazing paradoxes, a paradox of humanity.&amp;quot; The hardest part of the book to read\u2014for me, or anybody, I&amp;#039;d guess\u2014is a chapter on the Aeolus Cave in Vermont, once the winter home of tens of thousands of bats who&amp;#039;ve survived, even thrived there for 10,000 years. Kolbert has visited the cave annually since 2009, and while the bats were ubiquitous as recently as a decade ago, they&amp;#039;ve since been decimated by a fungus probably imported from Europe. In 2011, scientists could only count 35 at the cave. Of her visit in 2012, Kolbert wrote: &amp;quot;After we&amp;#039;d hiked all the way up to the entrance, the biologist I was with decided it would be a mistake to go on; the risk of disturbing any bats that might be left outweighed the benefits of counting them.&amp;quot; And in 2013: &amp;quot;I counted 10 bats clinging to the rock face around the entrance; most of them had the desiccated look of little mummies.&amp;quot; &amp;quot;I&amp;#039;ve never been to a war zone, I&amp;#039;m happy to say,&amp;quot; she tells me now, the sounds of Christmas carols droning incongruously around us. &amp;quot;But it was the small-mammal equivalent of a war zone. It was very cold, so they weren&amp;#039;t decomposed. They were stiff and frozen. You could not avoid them; you were stepping on them. By the time we went back the next year, it was all decomposed, a very rich, black soil completely carpeted with tiny little bat bones. When you looked closely you could see them, like pine needles.&amp;quot; If you don&amp;#039;t live in the Northeast or if you consider bats disgusting, maybe your reaction is, &amp;quot;Oh, well.&amp;quot; But according to ecologist Scott Bearer of The Nature Conservancy, without them we&amp;#039;d have way more pests harassing us (one bat can eat 1,000 mosquitoes in an hour). And crops would suffer both from pest damage and the absence of pollination and reseeding: &amp;quot;Their value has been estimated to be up to $50 billion a year in agricultural plant pollination alone,&amp;quot; Bearer says. Predicting exactly what will happen as the climate warms and biodiversity declines is tricky, to be sure. But models estimate that more than half the area of New Orleans, Atlantic City, and Miami Beach could be fully submerged within the next century. Most people are already experiencing the effects of global warming and species extinction, whether they realize it or not. Anyone who&amp;#039;s traveled West for a ski holiday has likely noticed the acres of dead pine trees, killed by pine beetles no longer kept in check by periods of very cold weather. In China, lacking bees to do the job, farmers have had to \u2028resort to pollinating fruit trees by hand. (Harvard \u2028researchers are developing &amp;quot;robo-bees&amp;quot; for the same \u2028purpose.) Half of the fish species we eat couldn&amp;#039;t survive without coral reefs, 90 percent of which will be seriously endangered, possibly dead, by 2050. And Kolbert mused that she could imagine &amp;quot;a day when there&amp;#039;s no more Oyster Bar at Grand Central, because you can no longer get any oysters.&amp;quot; (Oysters don&amp;#039;t like acidified waters, and hatcheries in the Pacific Northwest are already in trouble.) Humans will figure out a way to save themselves, Kolbert believes, even as the world changes beneath their feet and other species disappear. In Catastrophe, she wrote about residents of an Alaskan island who voted to relocate to the mainland because rising seas eventually would engulf their home. While the move may sound desperate, the point is that with advance knowledge, humans can make life-saving choices. Animals, not so much. Kolbert steadfastly refuses to say that her subject makes her sad\u2014&amp;quot;I go to interesting places and interview great people&amp;quot;\u2014but she becomes pensive when she talks about what the future holds for her three sons, a college-age boy in addition to her twins. &amp;quot;I am every bit a parent and am absurdly hopeful and optimistic for them.&amp;quot; She pauses and looks away. &amp;quot;At the same time, I&amp;#039;m aware that I am preparing them for a world that looks like the world of today, even though I know the world will look very different. I do think that puts things in perspective. The kinds of things parents worry about, I like to think I don&amp;#039;t worry about so much. I mean, the craziness around SAT prep, or whatever. Let&amp;#039;s worry about what the world is going to look like in 2050; let&amp;#039;s keep our eye on the prize.&amp;quot; In response to her work, Kolbert said she and her family have changed how they live. She drives a hybrid car, and their house is powered by solar energy; she wouldn&amp;#039;t give too many other details, fearing she might come off as preachy, and also, there&amp;#039;s the reality of the matter: &amp;quot;One of the burdens of knowledge is that I know those changes are marginal,&amp;quot; Kolbert says. &amp;quot;If you take one flight, if you do the numbers\u2014and unfortunately I know the numbers\u2014it wipes all that out. But I still do do those things; you have to.&amp;quot; You do have to; I know exactly what she&amp;#039;s talking about. As for the depth of sadness that the story of mass extinction touches in me, some of the most alive moments in my life have been encounters with the natural world: Spending a day flat on my back on an island off the coast of Norway to watch thousands of puffins awkwardly flying from their nests in a sheer rock face to the sea and back again. Seeing waved albatross do their highly choreographed mating dance 20 feet away from me on the cliffs of Espa\u00F1ola Island in the Galapagos at sunset. Watching the bats circle overhead as the stars come out in my backyard. Sitting outside the pen of Lonesome George, the last of the Pinta Island Galapagos tortoises, sobbing my eyes out. I think there&amp;#039;s a spiritual element in my response to nature, not in a religious sense, but in the way it can make me feel connected to something bigger than myself and my little world. I&amp;#039;m not a parent, but I&amp;#039;ve heard people talk about experiencing that kind of connection with their children. There is some way in which the beauty, the mystery, even the violence of nature remind me at a profound level of what it means to be human. Am I overly romantic about nature? Probably. And the demands and conventions of Kolbert&amp;#039;s job may require her to compartmentalize, may put her on the other extreme. We&amp;#039;re so different in this regard, we might as well be different species. But then, it&amp;#039;s going to take all kinds of species to save the world. "^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.elle.com/culture/career-politics/interviews/a12676/climate-expert-elizabeth-kolbert-profile/>