Elizabeth Kolbert will be speaking at OSU, Monday, February 2, 7 pm at the LaSells Stewart Center. Kolbert is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Her series on global warming, The Climate of Man, from which the book was adapted, won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine writing award and a National Academies communications award. She is a two-time National Magazine Award winner. She is also a recipient of a Heinz Award and Guggenheim Fellowship. Kolbert lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.
In anticipation of Elizabeth Kolbert’s reading, Spring Creek is giving away three hardback copies of Kolbert’s powerful new book The Sixth Extinction. Here’s how to enter:
1. “Like” the Spring Creek Project on Facebook. https://www.facebook.com/springcreekproject?ref=bookmarks
2. Leave a comment on our Facebook page telling us (in 20 words or less) one thing we can all do to help stem the loss of wild species and their habitats.
The three best suggestions will get a copy of The Sixth Extinction. The deadline is Tuesday, January 13, 5 p.m.
If you are not on Facebook, you can email your comment to Erica Trabold, Spring Creek Project Intern: trabolde@onid.orst.edu
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Here are some links to a few of our favorite recent articles by her:
- “The Big Kill: New Zealand’s crusade to rid itself of mammals” in The New Yorker
- “Building the Ark” Zoos may have to choose between keeping the animals we most want to see and saving the ones we may never see again in National Geographic
- “How the Paleolithic life style got trendy” in The New Yorker
About “The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History.” Over the last half-billion years, there have been five mass extinctions, when the diversity of life on earth suddenly and dramatically contracted. Scientists around the world are currently monitoring the sixth extinction, predicted to be the most devastating extinction event since the asteroid impact that wiped out the dinosaurs. This time around, the cataclysm is us. In prose that is at once frank, entertaining, and deeply informed, New Yorker writer Elizabeth Kolbert tells us why and how human beings have altered life on the planet in a way no species has before. Interweaving research in half a dozen disciplines, descriptions of the fascinating species that have already been lost, and the history of extinction as a concept, Kolbert provides a moving and comprehensive account of the disappearances occurring before our very eyes. She shows that the sixth extinction is likely to be mankind’s most lasting legacy, compelling us to rethink the fundamental question of what it means to be human.
