Field Notes from a Catastrophe

Kolbert was initially a New York Times reporter before moving to The New Yorker to focus on politics and environmentalism. She is also the author of a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the imminent ecological apocalypse, entitled The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History. She is a member of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Science and Security Board.

Around 4,300 years ago, the Babylonian leader Sargon of Akkad founded the world’s first Empire, located between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. His family ruled for three generations until, suddenly, Akkad collapsed. The “Curse of Akkad” was presumed fictional until Yale archaeologist Harvey Weiss discovered the ancient city of Tell Leilan in 1978. Weiss surmised that severe drought had caused the fall of the great city. Scientists in the 1980s and 1990s postulated shifting precipitation patterns as the cause of crop failure.

The Nobel Prize-winning Dutch chemist, Crutzen, coined the term “Anthropocene” to describe an age in which, for the first time in 10,000 years, mankind is the dominant influence on the world’s climate. As a result of Crutzen’s work, the chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs) that were destroying the ozone layer in the 1980s were phased out.