Elizabeth Kolbert started working for The New York Times as a stringer in Germany in 1983. In 1985, she went to work for the Metro desk. Kolbert served as the Times' Albany bureau chief from 1988 to 1991 and wrote the Metro Matters column from 1997 to 1998.
Kolbert, Elizabeth & Francis Spufford, eds. (2007). The ends of the Earth : an anthology of the finest writing on the Arctic and the Antarctic. 1st U.S. ed. New York: Bloomsbury.
Kolbert, Elizabeth, ed. (2009). The best American science and nature writing 2009. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.
Elizabeth Kolbert, "The Waste Land" (review of Lina Zeldovich, The Other Dark Matter: The Science and Business of Turning Waste into Wealth and Health, University of Chicago Press, 259 pp.; and Jo Handelsman, A World Without Soil: The Past, Present, and Precarious Future of the Earth Beneath Our Feet, Yale University Press, 262 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXIX, no. 3 (24 February 2022), pp. 4, 6.
— (August 22, 2022). "The political climate". The Talk of the Town. Comment. The New Yorker. 98 (25): 11–12.[q]
Elizabeth Kolbert, "A Trillion Little Pieces: How plastics are poisoning us", The New Yorker, 3 July 2023, pp. 24–27. "If much of contemporary life is wrapped up in plastic, and the result of this is that we are poisoning our kids, ourselves, and our ecosystems, then contemporary life may need to be rethought." (p. 27.)
Elizabeth Kolbert, "Spored to Death" (review of Emily Monosson, Blight: Fungi and the Coming Pandemic, Norton, 253 pp.; and Alison Pouliot, Meetings with Remarkable Mushrooms: Forays with Fungi Across Hemispheres, University of Chicago Press, 278 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXX, no.14 (21 September 2023), pp. 41–42. "Fungi sicken us and fungi sustain us. In either case, we ignore them at our peril." (p. 42.)
Elizabeth Kolbert, "Needful Things: The raw materials for the world we've built come at a cost" (largely based on Ed Conway, Material World: The Six Raw Materials That Shape Modern Civilization, Knopf, 2023; Vince Beiser, The World in a Grain; and Chip Colwell, So Much Stuff: How Humans Discovered Tools, Invented Meaning, and Made More of Everything, Chicago), The New Yorker, 30 October 2023, pp. 20–23. Kolbert mainly discusses the importance to modern civilization, and the finite sources of, six raw materials: high-purity quartz (needed to produce silicon chips), sand, iron, copper, petroleum (which Conway lumps together with another fossil fuel, natural gas), and lithium. Kolbert summarizes archeologist Colwell's review of the evolution of technology, which has ended up giving the Global North a superabundance of "stuff," at an unsustainable cost to the world's environment and reserves of raw materials.
Elizabeth Kolbert, "Rat Pack: The classic rodent studies that foretold a nightmarish human future", The New Yorker, 7 October 2024, pp. 60–63.
Introductions, forewords and other contributions
Van Gelder, Gordon, ed. (2011). Welcome to the greenhouse : new science fiction on climate change. Preface by Elizabeth Kolbert. New York: OR Books.
^Online version is titled "Why facts don't change our minds".
^Online version is titled "James Turrell makes light physical".
^Online version is titled "Climate change and the new age of extinction".
^Online version is titled "The art of building artificial glaciers".
^Online version is titled "What will another decade of climate crisis bring?".
^Title in the online table of contents is "The climate expert who delivered news no one wanted to hear". Originally published in the June 29, 2009 issue.
^A review of Martin J. Sherwin's Gambling with armageddon : nuclear roulette from Hiroshima to the Cuban Missile Crisis (New York : Knopf, 2020). Includes information from recently declassified sources.
^Online version is titled "Have we already been visited by aliens?".
^Online version is titled "The deep sea is filled with treasure, but it comes at a price".
^Online version is titled "How did fighting climate change become a partisan issue?".
^Online version is titled "The Little-Known World of Caterpillars".
"Focus 580; The Climate of Man," 2005-05-27, WILL Illinois Public Media, American Archive of Public Broadcasting (GBH and the Library of Congress), Boston, MA and Washington, DC, accessed June 7, 2021.
.png){kind=small}
