This is In Conversation from Apple News. I'm Shmita Basu. Today, the Pulitzer Prize-winning science

writer reflects on what she's learned about our changing planet.

Elizabeth Colbert knows that in order to tell the story of our changing planet and the scientists who study it, you need to experience it firsthand.

I've gotten to see some of the most ecologically spectacular places on our planet, the Amazon rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, the cloud forest,

and the Andes, just amazing places.

She's been doing this very hands-on kind of science writing for the New Yorker for more than 25 years, and she manages to capture both this awestruck attitude toward the world and the unsettling truth about

what humans are doing to it.

Our science is so marvelous and reckless and we can really see into cells and we can see

into DNA and we can see beyond cells, you know, two molecules and atoms.

And at the same time, we are just sort of willy-nilly wrecking a lot of the planet.

Elizabeth explores that tension in her new book, Life on a Little Known Planet, dispatches from a

changing world.

It's a collection of some of her essays that she's written over the years, where she introduces

us to intrepid researchers exploring pressing questions like, could AI help us communicate with sperm whales?

And do bodies of water have legal rights?

We started by talking about one of the first essays in her book, which looks at the so-called

insect apocalypse, and an entomologist

who's racing to document as many caterpillar species as possible before they disappear.

So the entomologist is named David Wagner, and he teaches at Yukon, and he is certainly the foremost expert on caterpillars in the U.S.

and probably one of the experts of caterpillars in the world. And a caterpillar is just the sort of

larval state of a moth or a butterfly. That's the definition of a caterpillar. And there are lots and

lots and lots of them in the world, and it's very hard to

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