Baao Community College- Library

Elizabeth Kolbert is a science writer for The New Yorker magazine. She is the author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, as well as several other books. Her writing focuses on the effects of humans and civilization on our planet's ecosystem. Much of her writing involves her experiences of various locations, as noted above. Previously, she was a reporter for The New York Times. Kolbert resides in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with her husband and children, and she writes in her home office across from Mount Greylock in Massachusetts. Pertaining to this book, Kolbert has been interviewed by national news and media organizations. Kolbert's decision to write this book was influenced by a 2008 Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences paper, titled, "Are we in the midst of the sixth mass extinction? A view from the world of amphibians". Subsequently, Kolbert wrote an article for The New Yorker, titled (similarly to her eventual book), "The Sixth Extinction?" Researching this article involved amphibian-hunting in Panama. She then realized, "I hadn't scratched the surface, that there was a book there."