The heaviness and (not) hope of climate change

FLORA LICHTMAN: Hey, it’s Flora Lichtman, and you’re listening to Science Friday. We are talking to one of my journalism idols. Elizabeth Kolbert has been writing about climate and the environment for decades. I remember being awed in the early 2000s by her groundbreaking series in the New Yorker on climate change, and the wannabe science writer that I was really moved.

Kolbert’s writing takes you all over the world and shows you how these giant existential threats are playing out for people, animals, and ecosystems. And she takes you inside the messy business of trying to solve these problems that we’ve created. Kolbert won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. The Science Friday Book Club is currently reading her latest book, Life on a Little-Known Planet, Dispatches From a Changing World. It’s a collection of essays she’s written over the years.

And today we’re diving into some of those stories and reflecting on her career that has shaped the way we think about climate and the environment. Elizabeth, welcome back to Science Friday.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Oh, thanks so much for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: There’s a story in the book that starts with you whacking a bush with a stick. What were you doing?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: I was out with an entomologist named Dave Wagner, one of the world’s sort of leading caterpillar experts, and we were looking for caterpillars. I would like to say that before I started out with Dave, before I headed out to Texas with Dave, I did not know that that was how you search for caterpillars.

But it turns out that what you do is you take what’s called a beating sheet, which sort of looks like a kite. And you put it under a bush or a plant that you’re interested to see what lives– what’s eating off of. And then you whack it with a pole. And whatever is on there– caterpillars, mainly, also leaves and just bits of debris– falls into this beating sheet. And then you have to sort of sift through it to see what you’ve got. And it’s a little bit like going on a treasure hunt.

FLORA LICHTMAN: It’s a little violent sounding.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: It’s a little violent sounding, but I think no caterpillars were really harmed in making this film. Whatever falls in there, most of it just gets released because it’s not terribly interesting and makes its way back onto the bush. If something’s very interesting, it does get put into a vial for study. So I guess some caterpillars do sacrifice their lives for the sake of science.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Yeah, and some get squished under a shoe in a hotel room too.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yes. Unfortunately, that also happens.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Caterpillars seem to be a little undersung. What do people miss about them.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, caterpillars, which are just the larval stage of any moth or butterfly, they are hugely important to ecosystems. They transfer tremendous amount of energy from leaf matter– so photosynthesis, basically– to the animal kingdom because they’re a huge food source for many other creatures, particularly birds. And yet, a great deal is not known about what caterpillars need, what food sources they need. So in a sense, you could argue the conservation of a lot of species of moths and butterflies depends on knowing that entire lifecycle.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Wagner, the scientist who you profile, is working on this four-volume encyclopedia of just western North American caterpillars, which struck me as like my struggle caterpillar version.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: That’s a very, very apt analogy. I really like it. But yes, let’s just say a deep dive, encyclopedic– supposed to be the definitive source on western caterpillars. And there are many, many of them, probably many more than even Dave will be able to collect in one lifetime or describe in one lifetime. But I think that’s just a testimony to how little is known about caterpillars. Such a work does not exist. It does exist for many, many other creatures.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, let’s zoom out for a second. Like much of your work, we start somewhere intriguing and delightful and end somewhere really depressing. This caterpillar jaunt takes us to the insect apocalypse. Obviously, that’s powerful branding. But is that truly what’s happening?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, the news from the insect world is really bad. It should be very disturbing to all of us because insects make up the majority of species on Earth. There’s a famous joke that to a first approximation, all species on Earth are insects. This number of insect species just really dwarfs all other groups. And they are what makes the world run. They disperse seeds. They pollinate. They decompose. They’re a huge food source for many other different groups.

So if you’re starting to lose your insects, you are really doing something very serious to the planet. And just about everywhere that people look, they find very serious declines in insect numbers. And that should really be a much bigger story than it has been.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Let’s switch gears a little bit. I want to talk about another story in the collection you wrote back in 2008. It’s about this small Danish community that goes carbon neutral. Tell us about it.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: So that story is about an island called Samsoe. The people who live on Samsoe are mostly farmers, potato farmers and strawberry farmers. And there’s a fairly significant tourist industry as well. But as they all put it to me, they were not unusual people. They were just ordinary people.

And the message of the piece really was that a small group of people that put their minds to it and really had a plan and some smart policies also on a national level– so it was a very hopeful story, and it was an example of what can be done when people put their minds to it. And one of the things that has sort of shocked me, to be honest, in the interim of almost 20 years is how few communities have followed that example.

FLORA LICHTMAN: What was interesting to me is that, like you said, it was a community of ordinary people. They didn’t identify as energy ideologues. But what happens is that energy use becomes a kind of sport on the island.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yeah. I think it showed the power of just focusing attention on something if you just get people to focus on something. And it became almost, as you say, a game. How can we do this? How much energy can we save? How can we make this transition? But coupled with that, I have to point out, were policies that made it make economic sense.

So this is an island, and it has a lot of wind power. It’s a very windy place. And so there were policies in place that really encouraged farmers to put up turbines on their own land. And then they put up some really significant offshore wind. And actually, as part of the piece, I climbed a wind turbine. I climbed to the top of a wind turbine, which was a really interesting and terrifying experience, but quite exciting.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Coming up after the break, I want to get a little personal and reflect on your career and how you think about the urgency of these issues that you cover and how you handle it. Are you up for that?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Sure.

FLORA LICHTMAN: An enthusiastic sure.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: I’ll try. I’ll try.

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FLORA LICHTMAN: So you have devoted a huge chunk of your career to covering climate and the environment. How depressed are you right now?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, certainly, it’s hard to look at what’s happening in the world right now and in the US right now and not be dispirited if your concern is climate change and the environment. I think that’s very difficult. I think a lot of people are trying to maintain a hopeful attitude. And there are glimmers of hope. I certainly don’t want to suggest that there aren’t. But the political situation and simply the numbers are very, very daunting right now.

FLORA LICHTMAN: We were at an event together recently, and I asked you what gives you hope. And you quoted James Hansen. And you said, I hope you’re listening. So I wanted to talk about that. I got the impression that hope is not the framework that you use, at least when you’re thinking about these issues. Can you talk about that a little bit?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yeah. I think it’s become sort of almost a cliche, almost, that we should end these stories on a hopeful note. And I think that the theory behind that is if you give people a bunch of bad news and you suggest that it’s hopeless, they’re not going to work to make the situation better. And I certainly understand that. And I completely believe in working to make the situation better, that it couldn’t be more urgent.

That is one of the reasons I wrote the piece about Samsoe to show people that there are paths forward. And there certainly are paths forward. And the good news is that many of the technologies that we need to address climate change– I never use the word “solve” climate change because climate change is something that doesn’t go away. Even once you stop emitting carbon, you don’t get the climate back that you had. But we really need to stabilize the climate. That is what we need to do.

And the technologies– solar, wind, various batteries– these have all come down tremendously in price since I started working on this issue. And that is a huge boon. That is a huge positive and shows that there are tools in their toolbox to address this.

Now, that being said, the current administration is doing its darndest to promote the use of fossil fuels, which is exactly what we shouldn’t be doing. So we are living at this very, very strange moment where the tools to really make a big, big difference are there, and they are affordable. But in fact, we’re sort of doing our best– in the US, at least– to try to strangle them.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Do you feel like the window is closed for averting real crisis?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Well, I think that what climate scientists would tell you is we are basically leaving the climate envelope under which humanity evolved. Humans have not lived– humans, modern humans, are not that old a species– a few hundred thousand years old. And the climate for most of that period has actually been a good deal colder than it is now.

And we’ve had these interglacial periods in there, like the ones we’re in now, which have been roughly as warm as we are now. And now we’re pushing beyond that into a hotter world that even our distant ancestors haven’t experienced. And what that world is going to look like is hard to know, exactly. All we have to go on is history. And we don’t have, in the whole history of the planet, basically– or, certainly, for many, many millions of years– an analog for what we’re doing to the climate right now.

So we are pushing into the unknown, and we’re sleepwalking into the unknown. And that, I think, is a pretty dangerous situation to be in.

FLORA LICHTMAN: You can read in your writing how moved you are by the natural world, and it’s one of the things that I admire so much about your work. You’ve described the Great Barrier Reef as a place you love. Take us there.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: So the Great Barrier Reef is the world’s largest reef. I once had the amazing experience of living with some researchers on this tiny coral island that had basically been formed out of little bits and pieces of the reef just sort of poking above the waves. And when the researchers weren’t out there, doing their research, they were snorkeling off this island. And that experience of looking down into this extraordinary profusion of life– you just can never see that many different species of animals on land. It’s just impossible.

But when you look through the kaleidoscope of life, from the sharks to the sea cucumbers to the amazingly beautiful fish, who are just all these fantastic colors, it really gives you a whole new view of life itself, I think, that we here who grew up in the temperate regions in this also, I should say, sort of impoverished ecosystems that most of us inhabit, it really tilts your worldview.

FLORA LICHTMAN: Well, I want to avoid the trope of ending on something inspiring and hopeful. So we should just say the Great Barrier Reef also takes us somewhere very depressing, right?

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yeah. Coral reefs are a very threatened ecosystem. Scientists believe they could be functionally extinct by the end of this century. And that’s a huge, huge– that would be just a phenomenal loss. If you raise the water temperature out of their comfort zone, what happens is that they expel their symbionts. They basically have these algal symbionts that live inside them and provide them with a lot of their nutrition. And they expel them. They turn white. That’s the phenomenon known as coral bleaching.

And we’ve had really serious coral bleaching events, global coral bleaching events, several of them in the last several years. And then you have these big, dead patches in the reefs. Now, I don’t want to end on a clichéd, hopeful note either. But I will say that there’s some really fascinating work going on in terms of, could we breed up or encourage corals to take up symbionts that are more heat tolerant?

And I was actually just in Miami, at the University of Miami, and some scientists there were doing some really interesting work on this and were achieving some success. The problem is the Great Barrier Reef, just to name one reef, is huge. It’s the size of Italy. So doing anything at the scale of the size of Italy is really difficult. But a lot of scientists are trying to think about, how can we try to scale up some of these efforts that might assist corals to get through the next century?

FLORA LICHTMAN: You know what this is telling me, this story? We can’t help but fall into the hope trap.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Yes. I think, obviously, humans, we’ve gotten through some really hard times for our species. And there have probably been moments when the number of humans on Earth was really pretty small. After some major volcanic eruptions, for example, it’s theorized that the human population was really pretty tiny.

And so we have gotten through. And what has gotten us through– well, we are a species that can foresee the future, that can worry, that can take action, that can be very creative. And we have gotten through pretty hard times in the past. So maybe there is something in our wiring, and maybe it will come to our rescue again. That is certainly the hope, that we’re very, very ingenious creatures.

And here we all are. So maybe there is something, deep in our wiring that will preserve us. And maybe we have to believe that. Maybe that is how we got here. And I guess the open question is, will it get us to where we need to go through the rest of the 21st century?

FLORA LICHTMAN: Elizabeth Kolbert is a staff writer at The New Yorker and author of several books, including Life on a Little-Known Planet, Dispatches From a Changing World. Thank you so much for joining me today.

ELIZABETH KOLBERT: Oh, thanks for having me.

FLORA LICHTMAN: The SciFri Book Club is diving into Elizabeth’s latest book. To read along with us, head to sciencefriday.com/bookclub. This episode was produced by Rasha Aridi. We’ll catch you next time. I’m Flora Lichtman.

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