Hey, it's Flora Lichtenen, and you're listening to Science Friday.

We are talking to one of my journalism idols.

Elizabeth Colbert has been writing about climate and the environment for decades.

I remember being awed in the early 2000s by her groundbreaking series in the New Yorker on climate change. And the

wannabe science writer that I was was really moved. Colbert's writing takes you all over the

world and shows you how these giant existential threats are playing out for people, animals, and ecosystems. And she takes you

inside the messy business of trying to solve these problems that we've created.

Colbert won the Pulitzer Prize in 2015. The Science Friday Book Club is currently reading her

latest book, Life on a Little

Known Planet, Dispatches from a Changing World.

It's a collection of essays she's written over the years, and today we're diving into

some of those stories and reflecting on her career that has shaped the way we think about climate

and the environment.

Elizabeth, welcome back to Science Friday.

Oh, thanks so much for having me.

There's a story in the book that starts with you whacking a bush with a stick.

What were you doing? I was out with an entomologist named Dave Wagner, one of the world's

leading caterpillar experts, and we were looking for caterpillars.

I would like to say that before I started out with Dave, before I headed out to Texas with

Dave, I did not know that that was how you search for caterpillars, but it turns out that what

you do is you take what's called a beating sheet, which sort of looks like a kite, and you put it under a bush or a plant that you're interested to see what lives, what's eating off of, and then you whack it with a pole and whatever is on there.

Caterpillars mainly also, you know, leaves and just bits of debris falls into this beating sheet, and then you have to sort of sift through it to see what you've gotten.

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