Life on a Little-Known Planet

A landmark collection of Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Kolbert’s most important pieces about climate change and the natural world

“To be a well-informed citizen of Planet Earth,” Rolling Stone has advised, “you need to read Elizabeth Kolbert.” From her National Magazine Award-winning series The Climate of Man to her Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Sixth Extinction, Kolbert’s work has shaped the way we think about the environment in the twenty-first century. Collected in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking essays.

An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific idees, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that’s succeeded in going carbon neutral, to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways, to the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting in a way that has implications for everyone. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who’s considered the “father of global warming,” amongst other scientists at the forefront of environmental protection.

The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.

“The author’s emphasis on the particular, and her quirky sense of humor—evident, for example, in her descriptions of her adventures in beekeeping as documented in “Stung”—make the pieces fascinating variations on a complicated theme in which despair and hope dance together… Thought-provoking speculations about a world on the edge of violent change.”

– Kirkus, Starred Review

“Elizabeth Kolbert’s writing illuminates the world’s complexities in vivid colour. No one contextualises the natural world better than she does, and no one is able to describe its many facets better than her.”

– Harriet Rix, science writer

“No one rivals Kolbert’s ability to write deeply, empathetically and engagingly about mankind’s relationship with the physical world … She brings curiosity and persistence to the most important issues facing humankind.”

– Chris Goodall, author of What We Need to Do Now

“There is surely no better way to understand our changing world than through the uniquely engaging perspectives provided by Elizabeth Kolbert. Joining her on this round-the-world voyage to some of the most incredible places on Earth is a treat … Immensely sobering yet also inspiring.”

– Chris Fitch, author of Wild Cities

“There can never be enough Elizabeth Kolbert, so I’ll take the new collection, Life on a Little-Known Planet, a greatest hits of the New Yorker environmental writer.”

– Chicago Tribune

“Pulitzer Prize-winning author and journalist Elizabeth Kolbert’s latest release, Life on a Little-Known Planet, is a collection of essays on the wonders of nature and the growing environmental threats that risk destroying it. Across 17 pieces, most of which originally appeared in the New Yorker, Kolbert takes readers around the globe…”

– TIME magazine

“You could fill a shelf, or an e-reader, this fall just with notable books on climate change, from Neil Shea’s Frostlines to Elizabeth Kolbert’s Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World.”

– Associated Press

“…Kolbert brings every creature, place, person, fact, and issue to scintillating life in these deft, engaging, lucid, and thought-provoking dispatches covering 20 years of her world travels during epic planetary changes. [She] resolutely and brilliantly alerts us to how little we know about our precious planet, how much harm we do, and how we must and can do better.”

—Booklist