Today's Observation

By Jon Kaltenbach
South Bend, IN Observer

Before meeting Elizabeth Kolbert, a journalist for the New Yorker and author of Field Notes from a Catastrophe, she may have been just another professional writer with a strong position matched with the talent and intelligence to support it. But last Friday she came to life for Notre Dame; and when she did, all her points may have struck just a little harder.

This isn’t a woman creating a story, but rather an observer and relater of things that are heard and observed, an objective journalist – not a scientist, as she is quick to assert. With this refreshing disillusionment come the conversely distasteful and sobering effects of her message. She’s real and so are her concerns.

Kolbert is a writer with enough critical awareness, both outward and inward, to realize the conflict between being environmentally sound and traveling regularly. Two separate times on Friday, the journalist ventured to weigh climate benefits gained by speaking in South Bend against the carbon emissions required for her journey by jet. She remained humbly uncommitted regarding the answer upon both considerations.

In the evening, Kolbert delivered a lecture at the Freed Center, complete with select photos from her considerable world traveling and an assortment of supporting graphs.

Kolbert told of her experiences in Greenland and the Arctic, of disappearing land and melting ice. She treated the crowd to a pair of desolate images of foreign research stations, or what she humorously referred to as “towns,” that consisted of little more than a few tents on a vast field of snow.

The graphs depicted ages of climate change and the sharp inconsistent trends discernable at the extreme end of their x-axis, the effects of human activities. The changes were apparent even beyond the rising, natural temperature trend that allowed for human existence in the first place.

In additional to an assortment of issues many in the audience already associate with unnatural climate change, Kolbert pointed out a larger, globally uniform consequence: the more ice that melts, the less of the sun’s heat, in the form of light, is reflected from the earth’s surface. Water, unlike its solid state, simply absorbs the light, heating the planet as a whole and therefore perpetuating the problem.

In her conclusion, Kolbert stressed not only the depth but the breadth of the issue. The answer, she maintained, was not simple solution; neither she nor any of the variety of scientist she interviewed had a single, corrective plan.

And that sort of answer is not welcome; Kolbert suggested that most people today look for “silver bullet” solutions to their problems, environmental destruction included. The trouble is, as Kolbert illustrated with a quip from a scientist acquaintance, the best we have is “silver buckshot.” Indeed, in keeping with this perspective, Kolbert’s own answer to what should be done was a profound “everything.”

After the lecture, Kolbert attended a book sale and signing in the front lobby of Freed. A long and eager line formed quickly. These people looked ready. They looked ready to heed Kolbert’s concluding advice that had been delivered moments earlier in the form of a simple, piquant, rhetorical question, “What are we waiting for?”