Pulitzer Prize-winning environmental journalist Elizabeth Kolbert to speak at Wake Forest University

Wake Forest University’s Sabin Center for Environment and Sustainability will host author Elizabeth Kolbert as part of its conference on advancing stewardship. Kolbert is known for her writings in The New Yorker magazine, and won a Pulitzer Prize for her book “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” 

Kolbert spoke with WFDD about her concerns for the environment. 

Interview highlights:

On parallels between her writings on the rise of sea-surface temperatures and hurricanes like Helene:

"There's this process called an attribution study, where scientists look at what are the odds of an event like this having happened before climate change warmed up the ocean temperatures and now, and they find that, in the case of Helene, it is made dramatically more likely. So a hurricane is not caused by climate change, but it can be pumped up by climate change. And that's what we're seeing — that rapid intensification is a pretty clear fingerprint of climate change and these very, very warm water temperatures over in the Gulf of Mexico."

On whether hurricane remnants reaching the North Carolina mountains is evidence that few places are safe from the effects of climate change: 

"I think this notion that there are going to be refuges where climate change is not a factor in life is, unfortunately, probably an illusion. Both drought and intense storms are both fingerprints of climate change. If you're in mountains where rivers come through valleys where they're constricted in their flow, then obviously you also are going to get tremendous damage from that too, if you get one of these deluges that dumps a year's worth of rain in a day."

On her Pulitzer Prize-winning book:

"That book has a pretty basic argument, and that is that extinction should be an extremely rare event, and otherwise the planet would not have the extraordinary biodiversity that it has. Extinction should be something that you wouldn't be able to see in a human lifetime, but now we see such extraordinarily high rates of extinction, we can all basically name creatures that have gone extinct or at the edge of extinction in our lifetimes. And that is a sign of something very, very unusual in Earth's history, potentially of one of these major mass extinctions, which the planet has gone through five times before. But there have also been many lesser mass extinction events. ... I think the evidence has only mounted since [2014, when the book came out] that what we are doing is truly of a geological nature, that we are pushing extinction rates up to points that we have not seen in many, many millions of years."