New book explores state’s coastal 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 throughout human history along the Georgia coast, as well as how those interactions have shaped the coast today.

Published by the University of Georgia Press, Coastal Nature, Coastal Culture examines how successive communities of Native Americans, Spanish missionaries, British imperialists and settlers, pulp and paper industrialists, vacationing northerners, Gullah-Geechee, nature writers 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 history of the coast as they are of natural landscapes, many of them restored, that now define so much of the region.