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Page added on April 11, 2006
Field of nightmares: A conversation with Elizabeth Kolbert
Over the past year, a perfect storm of scientific studies, dire weather events, and media coverage lifted global warming onto the mainstream national agenda. No writing had more impact than a series of closely observed pieces in The New Yorker by journalist Elizabeth Kolbert, which have now been collected and expanded into a book: Field Notes From a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change.
While most writing on climate change has relied on dry data and statistics, Kolbert’s is vivid, technicolor reportage. She went on expeditions with some of the world’s top climate scientists to Greenland, Iceland, and Alaska to witness the ongoing devastation firsthand. And she ventured to Washington, D.C. — one place that’s not changing quickly.
..Q: There’s some feeling on the right that the left is using global warming to achieve ulterior ends: slowing economic progress, redistributing wealth, etc.
A: You do find people who say the whole thing is a big lefty plot to destroy our way of life. I don’t know how you respond to that.
It’s very striking: When I went to Europe, I talked to the Dutch minister for the environment. In this country he would have been considered far left. He was a member of the Center Right party. His views were: obviously the industrialized world is going to have to cut its carbon emissions way, way down. The developing world is going to be using a lot more carbon, and how could we say they can’t? After all, our own wealth is based on that.
Q: You thought you were talking to a member of Greenpeace, but you were talking to a member of the Center Right ruling party in the Netherlands.
A: The politics are just so different over there. We have a level of political discourse here that’s considered by a lot of the world to be just … wacky.
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