2021 Reed Awards honor writing about the Southeast’s fragile coast
Two writers who have delved into the past and present challenges facing treasured places on the Southeast coast will receive SELC’s 2021 Phillip D. Reed Environmental Writing Awards, presented March 25 during this year’s Virginia Festival of the Book.
The Reed Awards honor the late Phillip D. Reed, a distinguished attorney, committed environmental activist, and a founding trustee of SELC, by celebrating some of the best environmental writing on the South.
In the book category, former Georgia state legislator Paul Bolster will receive the Reed Award for Saving the Georgia Coast: A Political History of the Coastal Marshlands Protection Act. In the journalism category, Tony Bartelme of The Post and Courier in Charleston will receive the Reed Award for his in-depth reporting on South Carolina’s coastal environment, including communities where the damaging impacts of climate change are happening now.
The featured speaker for the Reed Award presentation will be Lulu Miller, co-host of WNYC Studios’ Radiolab and author of the widely acclaimed Why Fish Don’t Exist, a nonfiction scientific thriller and memoir. The free, online event will be at 2pm Eastern Time.
To register, visit www.southernenvironment.org/reedaward.
About Winner Paul Bolster
Paul Bolster
In Saving the Georgia Coast, published by the University of Georgia Press, Paul Bolster brings to life the unlikely coalition of local residents, wealthy landowners, hunters and anglers, garden club members, courageous politicians and others who came together more than 50 years ago to defend Georgia’s unspoiled coastal marshlands. At the same time, he traces the intricate legislative maneuvers that resulted in passage of the 1970 Coastal Marshlands Protection Act, a law that remains the most comprehensive protection of marshlands along the Atlantic seaboard.
Bolster, who served a diverse Atlanta district in the Georgia House of Representatives for 12 years, does more than look back at this landmark legislative achievement. He also examines the policy challenges facing the Georgia coast today, among them how to address unrelenting development pressures and how to deal with rising sea levels and other impacts of a warming planet. He continues to follow environmental legislation in the state capitol and feels that lawmakers could look to the lessons from 50 years ago as a guide to protecting Georgia’s fragile coast today.
A freelance writer and historian, Bolster holds a Ph.D. degree in history from the University of Georgia and a law degree from Georgia State University School of Law. He taught American history at Clark Atlanta University for 14 years and has worked as a lobbyist for the Georgia Hospital Association and the American Hospital Association. A tireless advocate for affordable housing, he ran a Health Care for the Homeless program in Atlanta and served for three years on Governor Nathan Deal’s Council on Criminal Justice Reform.
About Winner Tony Bartelme
Tony Bartelme
Tony Bartelme, a special projects reporter for The Post and Courier, is being recognized in part for his stories from the Rising Waters Project, a series documenting how the accelerating forces of climate change are affecting Charleston and the South Carolina Lowcountry. Bartelme explains not only the science behind wetter hurricanes, intense “rain bomb” events and flooding high tides, but also the policy issues they raise and how they are making life harder for many South Carolinians. In other pieces recognized by this year’s award, Bartelme displays a gift for linking science with sense of place. These include a story tracing the human and natural history of South Carolina’s Santee Delta, and another on the quest by researchers to learn more about an elusive and rapidly disappearing marshland bird, the eastern black rail.
A graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, Bartelme is a three-time finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and has won some of the highest honors in journalism. He was awarded a prestigious Harvard University Nieman Fellowship in 2010. His investigative reporting has exposed government corruption and has explored subjects ranging from changes in ocean plankton to the global shortage of doctors. His latest book, A Surgeon in the Village: An American Doctor Teaches Brain Surgery in Africa, was published by Beacon Press.
About Featured Speaker Lulu Miller
Lulu Miller is a Peabody Award-winning science journalist who fell hard for radio when she joined the staff of WNYC Studios’ Radiolab, initially as a volunteer. She returned to the show as co-host this past year. She is also co-founder of NPR’s Invisibilia, a show about the invisible forces that shape human behavior. Her book Why Fish Don’t Exist has been hailed as a wondrous debut and was listed among the best books of 2020 by The Washington Post, NPR, Chicago Tribune and Smithsonian. It follows the life of taxonomist David Starr Jordan—the first president of Stanford University and a proponent of the eugenics movement—and reveals both the triumphs and the dark side of his relentless search for order in a chaotic world. Her book is also a deeply personal story about how to go on when everything seems lost. Miller is a graduate of Swarthmore College and earned an MFA in fiction writing from the University of Virginia.