You can’t praise Betsy Kolbert enough, in my opinion. She has been the must lucid, grounded, smart and committed journalist writing about climate change for several years. In The War on Rachel Carson here from a couple of years ago, I wrote “Nota Bene – I put Betsy Kolbert in a class with Rachel Carson. Kolbert’s Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change is a stunning picture of what we’re up against in confronting the specter of global warming. About 20 years ago, I was helping run a workshop on acid rain for some Sierra Club activists and we’d invited some press, not thinking anyone would show up, but lo and behold, a young reporter for the ‘NY Times’ did: Betsy Kolbert. We thought that was cool and so was she.”
In an interview with “Yale Environment 360” that’s just out, she talks about a number of things. On the public: “It gets back to this issue of whether the public believes in science, which, to be honest, we do not. You can still find a lot of people who don’t believe in evolution, okay? So we’re talking about a country that has a very lax relationship to science.” On the politics in Washington: “He [Obama] has a good plan put together by good people, but to translate that into a legislative action is going to be very, very difficult because of the way that our system can be held hostage by a minority. My fear is that in order to get something through Congress, it will be so watered down as to be meaningless.” On the morality of seeking solutions now: “Well, I’m no moral philosopher, but it seems to me in that if there’s not a moral dimension to potentially leaving a totally impoverished planet to future generations, all future generations, I don’t know what would be.”
If you read anybody on climate change, read Betsy Kolbert. If you haven’t read Field Notes from a Catastrophe, run out now and get it. Then start making some noise of your own.
