Join Andy Revkin in a special Sustain What conversation with Annalee Newitz and Elizabeth Kolbert, the acclaimed authors of new books charting humanity's bumpy and wondrous urban history and the future we’re building with technologies that raise as many questions as answers.
Annalee Newitz is both a science-focused novelist and pioneering science journalist. A founder of the io9 website and former editor-in-chief of Gizmodo, Newitz is a contributing opinion writer for The New York Times and author of several novels and nonfiction books, including "Scatter, Adapt, and Remember," a book on the megadisasters we’ve outrun - so far.
Newitz's new book, “Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age,” reveals fascinating new insights about H. sapiens' 10,000-year habit of urbanization, including the growing realization that the tropics, not the temperate zones, were the first place we tried this lifestyle.
Elizabeth Kolbert has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since she moved there from The New York Times in 1999. Her new book, “Under a White Sky - The Nature of the Future,” explores the tangle of unintended consequences left in humanity’s wake as we have dominated a host of Earth systems. She goes on a worldwide journey examining how some scientists and technologists are trying to use the same ingenuity that got us in trouble to wiggle out of calamity.
Her previous book, “The Sixth Extinction,” won a Pulitzer Prize.
Explore Newitz's work at http://techsploitation.com and sign up for The Hypothesis newsletter: https://thehypothesis.substack.com/
Follow Kolbert’s work in The New Yorker:
https://www.newyorker.com/contributors/elizabeth-kolbert
Find her book here:
https://sites.prh.com/elizabethkolbert
Andrew Revkin, the founding director of the Earth Institute Initiative on Communication and Sustainability, is the author of five books, most recently "The Human Planet - Earth at the Dawn of the Anthropocene" (with the photographer George Steinmetz) and "Weather - An Illustrated History, from Cloud Atlases to Climate Change" (with Lisa Mechaley).
http://j.mp/revkinbooks
Sustain What is a series of conversations curated by Revkin seeking progress where complexity and consequence collide. Explore: http://j.mp/sustainwhatplaylist
Send feedback or ideas for future episodes:
http://j.mp/sustainwhatfeedback