Reading from the warming Arctic

Thanks for being a paid member and making The Planet You Save newsletter happen each week. This month’s members reading club selection is the first chapter from Elizabeth Kolbert's landmark narrative journalism book Field Notes from a Catastrophe.

(As a reminder, you can read along and discuss the selections through the Threadable app. It's free, and currently only for iPhones. Go right to The Planet You Save's circle via this link)

Originally published in 2006, this book is bit of a throwback choice, but Kolbert's ability to explain the science of climate change with concrete impacts and human narrators is still as powerful as ever.

In this first chapter, Kolbert reports from Shishmaref, Alaska, a remote village in Alaska where in the early-aughts, residents are already in serious discussions about abandoning the town over sea level rise, becoming some of the first Americans to think of themselves as climate migrants. Through Shishamaref, and Alaska's thawing permafrost, she explains how unprecedented and unknown effects of global warming could feed upon themselves.