Kolbert is the 2016 recipient of The Sam Rose ’58 and Julie Walters Prize at Dickinson College for Global Environmental Activism, which was created to focus attention on the need to reduce the impact of human lives on the planet, particularly given the rising population predictions for this century.
Kolbert’s lecture will focus on her most recent book, The Sixth Extinction, which won the Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction in 2015. There is a scientific consensus that five previous mass extinctions have occurred over the past half-billion years. An asteroid impact about 65 million years ago caused the fifth extinction, which killed off the dinosaurs, Kolbert explained on NPR’s All Things Considered in 2014. “Now you’ll hear scientists say, we humans are the asteroid,” she said. She will discuss how human behavior is causing entire species to disappear from the planet.
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