Andrew C. Revkin is an American science and environmental journalist, author and educator. He has written on a wide range of subjects including destruction of the Amazon rain forest, the 2004 Asian tsunami, sustainable development, climate change, and the changing environment around the North Pole. From 2019 to 2023 he directed fthe Initiative on Communication and Sustainability at The Earth Institute of Columbia University.
Previously he was strategic adviser for environmental and science journalism at National Geographic Society. Through 2017 he was senior reporter for climate change at the independent investigative newsroom ProPublica. He was a reporter for The New York Times from 1995 through 2009. In 2007, he created the Dot Earth environmental blog for The Times. The blog moved to the Opinion Pages in 2010 and ran through 2016. From 2010 to 2016 he was also the Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding at Pace University. He is also a performing songwriter and was a frequent accompanist of Pete Seeger.
Andrew Revkin was born and raised in Rhode Island. He graduated from Brown University in 1978 with a degree in Biology. He later received a Master's in Journalism from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.
Early in his career he held senior editor and senior writer positions at Discover magazine and Science Digest, respectively.
From 1995 through 2009, Revkin covered the environment for The New York Times. In 2003, he became the first Times reporter to file stories from the North Pole area and in 2005-6 broke stories about the Bush administration's interference with scientific research, particularly at NASA.
In 2010, he joined Pace University's Academy for Applied Environmental Studies as Senior Fellow for Environmental Understanding.
Revkin has also written books on humanity's weather and climate learning journey, the once and future Arctic, the Amazon, and global warming. He was interviewed by Seed magazine about his book The North Pole Was Here, which was published in 2006. He stressed that "the hard thing to convey in print as journalists, and for society to absorb, is that this is truly a century-scale problem."
Revkin is among those credited with developing the idea that humans, through growing impacts on Earth's climate and other critical systems, are creating a distinct geological epoch, the Anthropocene. He was a member of the "Anthropocene" Working Group from 2010 to 2016. The group is charged by a branch of the International Commission on Stratigraphy with gauging evidence that a formal change in the Geologic Time Scale is justified.
