Elizabeth Kolbert
Photo: Annette Hornischer

Staff Writer, The New Yorker

Holtzbrinck Fellow - Class of Fall 2025

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1999. Between 2015-22, she was the Class of 1946 Environmental Fellow at Williams College. Before joining the staff at the New Yorker, Kolbert was a reporter for the New York Times. She received a BA from Yale University in Literature and was a Fulbright Fellow at the University of Hamburg. Her most recent book is H is for Hope: Climate Change from A to Z (Crown, 2024); she is the author or co-editor of four additional books: The Sixth Extinction (Henry Holt, 2014), which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction, Under a White Sky: The Nature of the Future (Crown, 2021), Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change, (Bloomsbury, 2006) and The Prophet of Love and Other Tales of Power and Deceit (Bloomsbury, 2004), and has edited books on science and nature writing and the Arctic and Antarctic. Kolbert’s work has been recognized with the BBVA Foundation Biophilia Award for Environmental communication, Blake-Dodd Prize of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, and a Guggenheim. She was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters in 2021.

Project Description

Under the Glacier: How Ice Shaped our World and Will Determine Its Future

The story of climate change is generally told in terms of human action, citing the two and a half trillion tons of CO2 people have pumped into the atmosphere since the start of the Industrial Revolution, and how this has changed the planet in ways more apparent every day. For her Academy project, Kolbert adds to her award-winning work elucidating climate change with a study on how the Earth responds to these changes. Key to the planet’s response are feedbacks—processes that amplify small shifts into much larger ones. Such is the power of feedbacks that they have repeatedly plunged the world into ice ages, and then running in reverse, thawed it out again. In her new book, Kolbert tells the story of the ice ages of the past in a way that conveys the importance of feedbacks to the future. The book weaves natural history and the history of science with contemporary, cutting-edge research. The ice ages may seem comfortably in the past—a feature of animated movies and dusty dioramas; in fact, they are all too relevant to a warming world.

Academy Activities

Oct 28 2025
The Nature of the Future Environment

Holtzbrinck Lecture

The Nature of the Future

Should we intervene in environmental processes to help repair the damage we have caused?

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Sep 15 2025

Fellow Spotlight: Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer at the New Yorker since 1999.  In her current book-in-progress, Kolbert tells the story of the ice ages of the past in a way that conveys the importance of environmental “feedbacks” to the future. The book weaves natural history and the histor ...

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Oct 29 2025

The Nature of the Future

We live in a physical world transformed by human actions. Increasingly, we are confronted with their unhappy consequences: climate change, species loss, degradation of ecosystems. Should we intervene again? Should we try to counteract the effects of our previous interventions? In this talk, Elizabet ...

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