Elizabeth Kolbert

Vegetative States

“Just about everything we have learned about the natural world in recent decades suggests that qualities like intelligence and sentience are much more widely distributed across the animal kingdom.”

Savvy in the Grass

Some botanists maintain that peas are capable of associative learning, others that tropical vines have a sort of vision. If plants possess sentience, what is the morally appropriate response?

Spored to Death

Fungi have caused some of the worst wildlife disease outbreaks ever documented. Will they come for us?

The Waste Land

Two crucial and interconnected resources—human feces and arable soil—face crises of mismanagement.

Chemical Warfare’s Home Front

Since World War I we’ve been solving problems with dangerous chemicals that introduce new problems.

He Tried to Be a Badger

The more that’s learned about cognition in other species, the tougher it is to make the case that our intelligence is anything special.

‘Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?’: An Exchange

On ‘This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate’

Can Climate Change Cure Capitalism?

Naomi Klein’s This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate

When Did the Great Flocks Arrive?

They Covered the Sky, and Then…

Perhaps, in ethical terms, it doesn’t much matter whether overhunting was or was not the sole cause of the passenger pigeon’s extinction. Practically speaking, though, it matters a good deal.