Lecture: Environmental History
Lecture: "Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Georgia's 'Little Grand Canyon' and the Soils of the South"
Brown College Visiting Environmental Writers and Scholars Series
Date: 02/21/2013 - 5:00pm
Location: Jefferson Hall
Let Us Now Praise Famous Gullies: Georgia's 'Little Grand Canyon' and the Soils of the South
A Public Talk by
Paul Sutter
Professor of U.S. History and Environmental History, University of Colorado-Boulder
February 21, 2013
5:00pm
Jefferson Hall
As part of its Visiting Environmental Writers and Scholars Series, Brown College welcomes back environmental historian Paul Sutter. Sutter teaches modern U.S. History and Environmental History at the University of Colorado at Boulder, but previously taught at the University of Georgia and the University of Virginia. He is the author of Driven Wild: How the Fight against Automobiles Launched the Modern Wilderness Movement (2002) and The Art of Managing Longleaf: A Personal History of the Stoddard Neel Approach (with Leon Neel and Albert Way, 2010). Sutter is also the editor of Environmental History and the American South: A Reader (with Christopher Manganiello, 2009), and edits the “Environmental History and the American South” book series, published by the University of Georgia Press. Among his numerous accomplishments, he has received fellowships from the Smithsonian Institution, The Huntington Library, and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
Dr. Sutter’s talk will examine Providence Canyon State Park, also known as “Georgia's Little Grand Canyon.” This hyperbolic nod to the park’s considerable scenic appeal obscures the fact that this “Grand Canyon” is also a massive erosion gully – perhaps the biggest in North America – that was allegedly caused by the poor farming practices of the cotton South. Sutter will attempt to make sense of the central irony of this place – that an environmental disaster is now preserved as a park – by examining both the history of Providence Canyon and the larger history of soil erosion in the plantation South.
Please direct all questions or requests for further information regarding this event to James Allison, Sara Shallenberger Brown Fellow in Environmental Writing, Brown Residential College, University of Virginia (jra5x [at] virginia [dot] edu or 804-651-0566).
