One of the last projects I worked on before I retired from the University of Alabama Center for Public Television in 2021 was a collaboration with Dr. Doug Phillips, host and executive producer of the long-running Alabama Public TV series, Discovering Alabama. The resulting program, Alabama Quadricentennial, consists of original interviews which I produced as well as archived interviews conducted through the years.
Covid delayed our work and I retired before the episode was completed. Although other producers completed the program for release in 2023, it is based on an outline I created and consists primarily of interview clips which I selected.
Alabama Quadricentennial offers Alabamians a look far ahead into the state’s future, to reflect on recent Bicentennial promises of “a coming era of unprecedented new growth and development”, and to consider how such change might affect Alabama’s lands, waters, and biodiversity. Leading environmental scientists join the program to share their concern that careless marketing of Alabama’s exceptional natural abundance could portray the state as a “plump sitting duck for the crowding world”, and thus lead to the eventual loss of this natural abundance.
