Life on a Little-Known Planet... or life on a little seen and barely understood planet

I've just finished Elizabeth Kolbert's essay collection, Life on a Little-Known Planet: Dispatches from a Changing World, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it as I get ready to scope another wilderness adventure in the Khuvsgul Lake Biosphere in remote Mongolia.

Kolbert — the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction — has spent two decades writing about the natural world for The New Yorker.

In this book her writing between 2005 and 2023 is gathered in a collection of essays organised into four loose groups: creatures, places, the ideas people have floated for fixing what's broken, and the people already quietly doing the fixing. Each piece has also been updated on where things stand now in each of the topics.

The planet, it turns out, is "little-known" not because we lack satellite data, but because most of us have stopped looking closely at what's in front of us.

That's the line that landed hard for me as someone whose livelihood comes from leading people into wild places.

Kolbert's real subject is attention.
To have the discipline of noticing a landscape well enough to see it changing.

It's what happens on a walk through nature… if you pay attention.

You can't tell that a wildflower is blooming three weeks early, or that a creek line has shifted, unless you've walked that same country enough times to hold it in memory.

I feel this everywhere we walk.

From the Fitzgerald Biosphere and the Stirling Ranges in Australia’s southwest where thousands of flowering species bloom each year and where you have to look closely to find the tiniest of orchids, to the Altai Mountains in Mongolia, where herders read the changing landscapes and move their herds accordingly.

These landscapes are living records of change, you just have to be present enough, and return often enough, to read them.

The other thing I appreciated is that Kolbert refuses to dwell in despair.

Her final section is about people already at work, restoring habitat, redesigning cities, rethinking agriculture.

Showing engagement is still possible, still worthwhile, still underway.
That's the spirit I try to bring to every retreat and walking adventure: walking isn't an escape from the changing world, it's a way of meeting it honestly, together, on foot, with our senses open.

If you're someone who feels most alive immersed in a forest, following a dirt path or walking towards an expansive horizon, this book will feel like proof that careful attention to a beetle, a treelike, a melting glacier, is a form of care.

I'd recommend it especially if you're new to thinking about climate and biodiversity; and even if you're not, Kolbert's observations are clear and rewards the return visit, much like nature trails do.

I also loved listening to Kolbert in this Daily Show interview.