Elizabeth Kolbert opens Life on a Little-Known Planet with the story of Katherine Moseby, a woman who has fenced vast tracts of land in the Australian outback in an attempt to safeguard the country’s marsupials – now in precipitous decline – from invasive cats. Moseby has been at it for three decades; there is no guarantee of success. Yet when someone suggests that it could take 100 years for her work to make any difference, Moseby shoots back: “What else are you doing?”

It is such individuals who are at the heart of this book. There is David Wagner, attempting to catalogue all of North America’s caterpillars so as to better know and protect them. There is Adrian Corless, trying to prove that it is possible to suck carbon dioxide from the atmosphere at sufficient scale to alter our collective future. There is David Gruber, using AI to decode the languages of whales. And indeed, there is Kolbert herself, who, as a journalist, has been grafting at the environmental coalface for almost 30 years. This book selects her essays from across that period, written almost exclusively for The New Yorker.

The title is taken from entomologist Howard Ensign Evans’ 1968 book of the same name. “Is it sensible to poke about for strange beings in space while we blindly exterminate those about us?” Evans asked. He implored us to pay attention to the many overlooked insects – often classed as pests – that we share our daily life with. Kolbert, in her clean, precise prose, asks us to do the same – to be curious, to pay attention, and not to look away from the imperilled beauty of our planet.

The book works well as a primer for the guiding issues and ideas that comprise 21st-century environmentalism. Kolbert has a knack for elucidating abstract concepts – sea level rise, de-extinction, genetic engineering, invasive species – by locating them in particular places and people. For sea level rise we travel to Miami Beach, Florida, where luxury condos with ocean views are swamped by water bubbling up through the ground. Invasive species finds her in New Zealand, where the management of mammals destroying native fauna is pursued with such zeal that it brings communities together.

Some pieces cannot help but feel dated, as much writing on the environment must so quickly become. There is something tragic in reading a profile of James Hansen, the scientist who first testified about climate change to Congress. When it was written, back in 2009, it felt as though the US administration, and the world, might be on the cusp of taking Hansen’s testimony seriously. As a whole, the book collects a litany of lost chances. It is alarming to read, in a piece written 15 years ago, how the window to take action on climate change is rapidly closing. Whatever else we can say about the climate crisis, we can’t pretend we didn’t see it coming.

But if one thing unites the individuals in these pages, it is their refusal, in the face of any odds, to look away. When Kolbert visits the office of Christiana Figueres, the UN executive secretary who led negotiations for the Paris Agreement, she sees this motto framed on the wall: “Impossible is not a fact, it is an attitude.” Each of the characters in these pages subscribes to that position. Will it make a difference? Will writing about it change anything? Who knows? But what else are you doing?

Life on a Little-Known Planet:Dispatches from a Changing World by Elizabeth Kolbert. The Bodley Head, 2025. ISBN: 9781847929051

Adam Weymouth is a writer. His latest book, Lone Wolf (Penguin), was shortlisted for the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction. www.adamweymouth.com