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Lecture Notes
Posted by Elizabeth Kolbert, February 28th, 2006
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Filed under: Guests.
Tonight I'm giving a lecture on global warming at Williams College. I was asked to give the lecture by a friend who works at the college's Center for Environmental Studies, someone I got to know during a fight against a local development project. (My husband also works at Williams, and we live in Williamstown, MA, at the edge of what used to be a rural neighborhood filled with cows and is now a formerly-rural neighborhood filled with second homes.) When I agreed to give the lecture, months and months ago, my assumption was that having spent the last two years writing about global warming, I wouldn't have any trouble coming up with something to say. Of course, I was mistaken. (Only Day 2 of this blog, and already this seems to be becoming a theme???)
One of the things that you learn as a journalist (or at least should learn) is the importance of genre. I worked for many years at the New York Times ??? fourteen, to be exact ??? and there I learned to write what everyone would recognize as a New York Times story. Then I went to work at the New Yorker. It was a disconcerting experience, like mastering French only to find that you are being posted to China. In a way, I had to learn to write all over again.
In writing about global warming, there were many things that I tried to do. I traveled to a lot of places ??? Greenland, Alaska, Iceland ??? and tried to convey what I had seen. I talked to a lot of people ??? scientists, politicians, Inupiat hunters ??? and tried to convey what I had heard. The one thing I tried not to do was deliver a lecture. So what was I going to do, now that I had agreed to deliver a lecture? (I myself rarely attend lectures, though in Williamstown you could go to one practically every night.)
After a lot of agonizing, I decided I would talk about the history of climate science. This, you could argue, is an odd choice, since obviously I'm not a historian of science. I think, though, that when people learn that everything we are seeing today ??? the melting of the polar ice cap, the thawing of permafrost, the steady rise in average global temperatures ??? was predicted by climate scientists decades ago, they begin to understand why what's often called the "debate" over global warming isn't really a debate at all. At least that is my hope???
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Field Notes from a Catastrophe
Elizabeth Kolbert
Elizabeth, if you were going to deliver your lecture in a country that hasn't schemed to discredit and dismiss the idea of global warming, would you feel as agonized? It's interesting (and, given the American perspective at present, obviously, a good idea) that you've decided to speak about the history of climate science, and that this decision has put you more at ease about giving the lecture.
That's a good question, Vladimir. I suspect that the people who will show up to the lecture are the sort who are already convinced of the urgency of the problem, which raises the whole issue of preaching to the converted. But I'll let you know how it goes.
I'd love to hear more about learning to write for the New Yorker. Some of the differences would be obvious (going from a daily to a weekly), but each New Yorker writer has such a distinct voice - you don't confuse Gladwell with Orlean with Frazier - that I think it would be fascinating to hear about your experience with that transition. How did the new venue change your writing habits? Or change your voice? You must have had to unlearn so many habits from the Times (or so I'd imagine).
Thanks for taking the time to blog here. I can't wait for your book!
Bryce:
You're definitey right that to go from the Times to the New Yorker you have to unlearn a lot of habits. To name one, a Times article tells you exactly what it is going to say right at the top, which is why you can read just the front page portion of a big story and skip the jump, and still have a very good idea of what is going on. In a New Yorker story, the whole point is not to give away the story until the reader is committed. (Sometimes you never really give away what the story is about.) I sometimes think of the two -- writing a Times story and writing a New Yorker story -- as inverse processes.
In terms of "voice," I think it turns out that people just really do have different voices, just like they have different fingerprints. The voice that I write in is not my real voice, though. (This, I think, is one of the reasons it can be so disappointing to meet your favorite writer.) Where does it come from? I guess I wish I knew....