Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture: Environmental Histories of the Georgia Coast

Paul S. Sutter · Paul M. Pressly

korr 2018 · University of Georgia Press

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An essay collection exploring the history of 5,000-year relationship between human culture and nature on the Georgia coast.

One of the unique features of the Georgia coast today is its thorough conservation. At first glance, it seems to be a place where nature reigns. But another distinctive feature of the coast is its deep and diverse human history. Indeed, few places that seem so natural hide so much human history. In Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture, editors Paul S. Sutter and Paul M. Pressly have brought together work from leading historians as well as environmental writers and activists that explores how nature and culture have coexisted and interacted across five millennia of human history along the Georgia coast, as well as how those interactions have shaped the coast as we know it today.

The essays in this volume examine how successive communities of Native Americans, Spanish missionaries, British imperialists and settlers, planters, enslaved Africans, lumbermen, pulp and paper industrialists, vacationing northerners, Gullah-Geechee, nature writers, environmental activists, and many others developed distinctive relationships with the environment and produced well-defined coastal landscapes. Together these histories suggest that contemporary efforts to preserve and protect the Georgia coast must be as respectful of the rich and multifaceted history of the coast as they are of natural landscapes, many of them restored, that now define so much of the region.

Contributors: William Boyd, S. Max Edelson, Edda L. Fields-Black, Christopher J. Manganiello, Tiya Miles, Janisse Ray, Mart A. Stewart, Drew A. Swanson, David Hurst Thomas, and Albert G. Way.

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PAUL S. SUTTER is an associate professor of history at University of Colorado, Boulder. He is the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement.PAUL M. PRESSLY is director of the Ossabaw Island Education Alliance, a partnership between the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, the Georgia Department of Natural Resources, and the Ossabaw Island Foundation.JANISSE RAY is the author of the best-selling Ecology of a Cracker Childhood and, more recently, The Seed Underground: A Growing Revolution to Save Food. She is also the author of a poetry collection, A House of Branches, and coeditor of Between Two Rivers: Stories from the Red Hills to the Gulf. She previously taught in the Chatham University Low-Residency Master of Fine Arts Program in Creative Writing. Currently, she is a visiting professor and writer-in-residence at universities and colleges across the country. She lectures nationally on nature, agriculture, seeds, wildness, sustainability, writing, and the politics of wholeness. She lives in the Altamaha Community in Reidsville, Georgia.MART A. STEWART is a professor of history and Affiliate Professor, Huxley College of Environmental Studies, at Western Washington University.DAVID HURST THOMAS is the curator of anthropology at the American Museum of Natural History. In addition to his discoveries on St. Catherines, he has completed major excavations at Gatecliff Shelter in Nevada and of a Spanish mission south of Santa Fe, New Mexico.