Life on a Little-Known Planet cover

Life on a Little-Known Planet

by Elizabeth Kolbert

Collected in Life on a Little-Known Planet are her most influential and thought-provoking essays. An intrepid reporter and a skillful translator of scientific idees, Kolbert expertly captures the wonders of nature and paints vivid portraits of the researchers and concerned citizens working to preserve them. She takes readers all around the globe, from an island in Denmark that’s succeeded in going carbon neutral, to a community in Florida that voted to give rights to waterways, to the Greenland ice sheet, which is melting in a way that has implications for everyone. We meet a biologist who believes we can talk to whales, an entomologist racing to find rare caterpillars before they disappear, and a climatologist who’s considered the "father of global warming," amongst other scientists at the forefront of environmental protection. The threats to our planet that Kolbert has devoted so much of her career to exposing have only grown more serious. Now is the time to deepen our understanding of the world we are in danger of losing.

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