Elizabeth Kolbert Addresses First-Year Students at Koeppel Center
 
HARTFORD, Conn. – As an adult returning to the town where she had once lived, Elizabeth Kolbert’s curiosity about climate change was “piqued” when she noticed that a local pond was not freezing as often as it had in her youth.

That episode led Kolbert to write a three-part series on global warming for her employer, The New Yorker, which then served as a springboard for her widely praised book, Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change. Kolbert was the featured speaker Friday, September 4, as part of the First-Year Reading Initiative, a centerpiece of orientation.

Elizabeth Kolbert Speaks to Trinity's Class of 2013

Kolbert was joined by Associate Academic Dean Thomas M. Mitzel and members of the Class of 2013 at the Koeppel Community Sports Center. She will return again in four years to address the students as their commencement speaker.

Although not a scientist herself, Kolbert traveled around the world during 2004 and 2005, inducing the scientists that she visited with to share their data and knowledge. She said they were eager to share their research and interpreted that as “an indication of how much they felt they needed to reach a general audience.”

Kolbert fielded questions both from Mitzel and from students and faculty, and was generally not optimistic that the world is ready or willing to tackle global warming. She was especially harsh when it came to the United States, where she said, a series of small steps – such as turning off appliances and computers, driving less, and using public transportation – could have a huge impact on reducing harmful emissions.

But, she said, that was unlikely to happen unless it became financially feasible, meaning that fossil fuels would have to become so expensive that people would have no choice but to change their behavior.

“The Chinese have seen an economic opportunity in [developing] green technologies,” she said. “The concern in the United States is that we’re going to fall behind and that we’re not pursuing it with the same vigor that the Chinese are.”

Kolbert said she could see a time when huge numbers of people are displaced because of rising waters, the inability to grow food and drought, situations that could result in global conflict.

Kolbert was asked by a student if she intentionally sought to make a strong case in her book that the planet was undergoing climate change to strengthen her case. “But,” she said, “the facts in the case were so compelling that I didn’t have to do much more than point them out.”

She also noted that she did not think that global warming was due simply to the natural cycle of the planet, but instead was being sped up by the wasteful habits of the world’s population and the over-reliance on fossil fuels. She said there is almost no doubt that the world’s ecosystem will undergo significant change and that certain species will become extinct.

“The Rocky Mountains are still going to be there,” she told her audience. “But the question is what’s going to be living in the Rocky Mountains.”

Asked whether the trend toward global warming was unstoppable, Kolbert answered, “No one can say.” It’s possible, she said, that people will “just give up.” Or it’s possible that people will begin to address the problem. However, she acknowledged, “The odds are stacked against us.”

In writing Field Notes from a Catastrophe, Kolbert traveled from Alaska to Greenland, and points between. The original three-part series in The New Yorker won the 2005 National Magazine Award in the Public Interest category. The book was chosen as one of the 100 Notable Books of the Year (2006) by The New York Times Book Review.

Kolbert has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1999. She has written dozens of pieces for the magazine, including profiles of Hillary Rodham Clinton; New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg; and former New York Mayor Rudolph Giuliani.

In addition to being named a Notable Book by The New York Times, Field Notes from a Catastrophe won the American Association for the Advancement of Science’s magazine award, as well as the 2006 National Academy of Sciences Communications Award in the newspaper/magazine category.

Prior to joining the staff of The New Yorker, Kolbert was a political reporter for The New York Times.  She is a graduate of Yale University, and lives in Williamstown, Massachusetts.