Phil Reed Writing Award
Winning writers look at Atlanta’s hidden watershed and mining destruction in the Appalachians
From left: David Kaufman, H. Emerson Blake, & Tim Thornton
SELC is pleased to announce the winners of this year’s Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment. In the Book category, Atlanta-based writer and photographer David Kaufman received the award for Peachtree Creek: A Natural and Unnatural History of Atlanta’s Watershed. In the Journalism category, reporter Tim Thornton won for his series about mountaintop removal coal mining, “Moving the Mountains," published in The Roanoke Times.
The awards, which include a $1,000 prize, were presented March 28 at SELC headquarters in Charlottesville during the 2008 Virginia Festival of the Book.
Atlanta’s Peachtree Creek
David Kaufman spent 13 years exploring one of Atlanta’s urban waterways from its headwaters to its confluence with the Chattahoochee River. He provides a full and fascinating picture of Peachtree Creek, not only through his camera lens but also through conversations with local people and through extensive research of historical records. Peachtree Creek, published by the University of Georgia Press, weaves past with present, showing the influence of both man and nature on the landscape, the people, and the course of the stream itself—from massive culverts choked with waste to the century-old Wallace dam to a bridge frequented by the homeless to bucolic stretches frequented by anglers. At the conclusion of his examination of the stream in all its manifestations, Kaufman makes a heartfelt call for conservation.
H. Emerson Blake, editor-in-chief of Orion magazine and longtime judge for the Phil Reed Award, says of Peachtree Creek: “Wallace Stegner said that a place is not a place without a poet. Peachtree Creek has found its poet in David Kaufman. Peachtree Creek describes how profoundly we are shaped by our surroundings and how profoundly, and destructively, we are able to modify those surroundings. This is the kind of story that really makes one stop and think about what kind of world we want to live in.”
Moving the Mountains
Tim Thornton’s winning series in the The Roanoke Times was the first in-depth look at the destructive practice of mountaintop removal coal mining in Southwest Virginia. Thornton spent untold hours researching the legal, economic and environmental angles of this issue. He also traveled the coalfields to talk with the people whose lives are affected when coal companies blast apart mountain tops and ridges to expose the coal seams and dump the rubble in creeks and headwaters. Thornton’s no-frills prose exposes in pure form the stories of the communities and the landscape of the region. In addition to the Reed award, his series won awards from the Society of Environmental Journalism and the Virginia Press Association.
Janisse Ray, a Reed judge and former Reed winner, says of Thornton’s work: “This is a thorough investigation into the greatest tragedy of the American landscape today. I read it greedily, filled with equal parts of bottomless sadness and amazement at the people who, despite the odds, have found the courage and enlightenment to fight it. Very impressive.”
The award is named in memory of SELC founding trustee Phillip D. Reed, a talented attorney and committed environmental activist who helped guide our organization through the early years before his untimely death in 1993.
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"Government, business and environmental organizations all have an important role to play when it comes to protecting the environment. Yet the most profound and lasting changes will come from ordinary people making better choices in how they live. An informed citizenry is the cornerstone of our democracy. We rely on the journalists and writers who tell the stories of our natural world and give voice to the rivers, forests and wildlife. Each year, the Southern Environmental Law Center provides a valuable public service in honoring those writers whose work contributes to our understanding of our relationship with the Earth with the annual Phillip D. Reed Memorial Award for Outstanding Writing on the Southern Environment."
- Al Gore, 2004
