Review of Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World by Elizabeth Kolbert

Elizabeth Kolbert is such a fantastic writer, and when Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World was available on NetGalley, I jumped on it. Thanks to Crown for the review copy! This book is a collection of Kolbert’s essays about the natural world and especially climate change. They showcase Kolbert’s talents but, more importantly, serve as testimony to the anthropogenic era of our planet. Oddly enough, I think this collection might be more relevant a hundred years from now than today.

The main drawback, you see, is that most of these pieces are … old. Like a decade-plus for some of them. Kolbert helpfully attaches tiny addenda at the end of the pieces, giving us a tiny update on the status of whatever slow-motion disaster she was writing about (spoiler alert: it’s not good). Yet that feels insufficient. The essays about the COP meetings and the Paris Agreement in particular have, uh, not aged well….

Don’t get me wrong: obviously there is still value in Kolbert’s writing—heck, how many of my book reviews on this site have aged well in the eighteen years I’ve been writing them?? There is value in a retrospective collection like this. But I wish Kolbert had, say, written some new pieces that she could pair with some of the old ones as sequels. Alas.

It took me a while to read this collection, for I kept being struck by a deep and abiding sadness. It’s not quite doomerism—the optimist within me, whom I have yet to snuff out despite my best efforts, actually believes we will avert the worst of catastrophic climate change consequences. Nevertheless, these essays put a very fine point on how these consequences are already occurring and, indeed, have been occurring for years. Our opportunities to avert crises are slipping through our fingers while our politicians keep building pipelines.

Nevertheless, that mounting sense of resentment and anger isn’t Kolbert’s responsibility—if anything, it’s a sign of how poignant her writing is. I think this book is best as a gift to a less climate-aware person in your life, someone whose insulation from these issues means they don’t quite understand just what’s going on. I think for many of us climate change is a buzzword, something we reference to explain away extreme weather events or check for political polarization. What Life on a Little-Known Planet does best is ground this issue in very real, human, and local concerns. From beekeepers to city planners, Kolbert’s interviewees are, for the most part, ordinary people doing ordinary jobs that are just made harder by climate change.

So while I can’t give this book a full-throated recommendation, simply for its anachronistic qualities, I will certainly provide a conditional one, alongside a resounding endorsement of Kolbert’s skill and passion as a writer.