Life on a Little-Known Planet

Elizabeth Kolbert collects 17 essays of environmental journalism, most originally published in The New Yorker, plus an introduction, into four thematic parts. The book opens in the Australian outback, where ecologist Katherine Moseby builds exclosures (fences designed to exclude feral cats) to protect endangered marsupials. Moseby experiments with greater bilbies, exposing them to a few cats in the hope of breeding an innate fear of predators over generations. This scene establishes the book's central tension: Humanity is simultaneously destroying and coming to understand the natural world at unprecedented speed. Kolbert invokes biologist E. O. Wilson's observation that the human trajectory has grown increasingly destructive in impact yet increasingly sophisticated in insight, and situates the essays within what many geologists call the Anthropocene, a proposed new geological epoch defined by human dominance over Earth's systems.

Part One focuses on species and ecosystems under pressure. "Talk to Me" reports on the Cetacean Translation Initiative (Project CETI), the most ambitious effort ever made to decode the communication of another species: sperm whales. Marine biologist David Gruber, a professor at the City University of New York, became fascinated by sperm whale codas (quick bursts of clicks exchanged between whales) while on fellowship at Harvard's Radcliffe Institute in 2017. A team of computer scientists and roboticists coalesced around the project, which received 33 million dollars in philanthropic funding and established headquarters in Dominica. Kolbert travels there to observe fieldwork, encounters the complex social structure of sperm whale units, and witnesses a rare birth. The essay explores whether codas exhibit duality of patterning, the hallmark of human language in which meaningless units combine to form meaningful ones. "Life on a Little-Known Planet" profiles entomologist David Wagner, a University of Connecticut professor racing to document caterpillar species amid what may be an insect apocalypse: A 2017 study near Krefeld, Germany, found flying insect biomass had dropped by three-quarters in under 30 years. "Killing Mrs. Tiggy-Winkle" takes Kolbert to New Zealand, whose 80-million-year isolation produced fauna with no native land mammals besides bats; the Maori, arriving around 1300, hunted all nine species of moa (giant flightless birds) to extinction, and British settlers introduced further predators. The country now aims to eliminate all invasive mammalian predators by 2050. "Stung" investigates colony collapse disorder (CCD), a mysterious ailment in which honeybees abandon their hives, placing it within a broader pollinator crisis whose cause remains unknown.

Part Two examines places transformed by environmental change. "A Song of Ice" reports from the Greenland ice sheet, a holdover from the last ice age containing compressed layers of snow dating back over 100,000 years. Kolbert visits a Danish ice-core drilling project and recounts the discovery of Dansgaard-Oeschger events, violent temperature swings of 15 degrees in 50 years during the last ice age that suggest the climate can flip abruptly between states. At Ilulissat, above the Arctic Circle, the Jakobshavn ice stream has nearly tripled its pace since the 1990s, and glaciologist Eric Rignot of UC Irvine warns that once ice-sheet "floodgates" open, even halting emissions will not reverse the damage. "The Lost Canyon" describes how drought is shrinking Lake Powell, a reservoir on the Colorado River, revealing the submerged wonders of Glen Canyon; a 2021 Science paper concludes the region faces its worst megadrought in at least 1,200 years. "The Island in the Wind" profiles the Danish island of Samsø, whose 4,300 residents went from fossil-fuel dependence to producing more renewable energy than they consume by 2005, and the Swiss 2,000-Watt Society, which proposes capping global energy use at 2,000 watts per person. "The Siege of Miami" investigates sea-level rise already flooding South Florida, where porous limestone bedrock renders levees useless because water rises from below; projections range from 3 to 10 or more feet of rise by century's end, yet more than 25,000 new condo units were proposed or under construction.

Part Three explores ambitious interventions. "Testing the Waters" examines the movement to grant legal rights to natural objects, tracing the idea to law professor Christopher Stone's 1972 article "Should Trees Have Standing?" and following a lawsuit filed by Florida lakes and streams against a proposed development. In 2020, Orange County voters overwhelmingly approved a bill of rights for local waterways, but the Florida legislature had already preempted the measure. "A New Leaf" reports on efforts to reengineer photosynthesis through the RIPE project (Realizing Increased Photosynthetic Efficiency) at the University of Illinois; modified tobacco plants have outperformed controls by up to 20 percent in field trials. Global agricultural output must rise by nearly 70 percent by 2050 to feed a population nearing 10 billion. "Going Negative" investigates carbon dioxide removal technologies. Of 116 scenarios modeled by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that limit warming to below two degrees Celsius, 108 require negative emissions, yet the technology remains unproven at scale and critics describe reliance on it as a moral hazard. "Recall of the Wild" reports on European rewilding, including a 15,000-acre Dutch reserve stocked with Heck cattle (bred in the 1920s and 1930s by Nazi-affiliated scientists to approximate the extinct aurochs, a large wild bovine), Konik horses, and red deer. The animals are not fed or vaccinated, and mortality can approach 40 percent, illustrating the unpredictability of restoring wildness on a human-dominated planet.

Part Four profiles five individuals whose work addresses different dimensions of the environmental crisis. "The Catastrophist" follows James Hansen, director of NASA's Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who created one of the world's first climate models and whose 1981 predictions about warming proved correct decade after decade. Hansen has concluded that the dangerous threshold for atmospheric CO₂, no more than 350 parts per million, has already been surpassed, and his activism has made him controversial among fellow scientists. "The Weight of the World" profiles Christiana Figueres, the Costa Rican diplomat who led the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Secretariat through the negotiations producing the 2015 Paris Agreement. Figueres cultivated relationships across all blocs, carefully avoiding language like "decarbonization" that alienated Saudi representatives, yet many countries have since failed to meet their commitments. "Mr. Green" profiles Amory Lovins, who has argued since his 1976 Foreign Affairs essay that the United States can phase out fossil fuels at a profit. Lovins coined the term "negawatt" (a watt saved through efficiency) and runs the Rocky Mountain Institute (RMI). Critics counter that since the mid-1970s, U.S. energy intensity dropped 46 percent, but total consumption rose 39 percent. "The Guru of Doo-Doo" profiles Sam Wasser, a conservation biologist at the University of Washington who uses DNA from elephant dung and ivory to track poaching networks across Africa, identifying two geographic hot spots that account for most illegal ivory.

The collection closes with "Last Words," Kolbert's account of the dying Eyak language of Alaska. Chief Marie Smith Jones, the last native speaker, was 87 and legally blind when Kolbert visited her. Linguist Michael Krauss of the University of Alaska Fairbanks, the only other person who understood Eyak, spent decades compiling a 6,000-term dictionary. Eyak, distantly related to Navajo and Apache through the Athabascan language family, makes distinctions absent in English; a single word can express a concept as specific as whether someone will keep tickling another person in the face in the same spot repeatedly. Krauss argued that each language is a treasury of human experience, and that losing one narrows humanity's capacity to understand reality. Smith Jones died in 2008 and Krauss in 2019. Much of what survives of Eyak is archived online, a digital remnant of a world that, like so many the book describes, was both fragile and irreplaceable.