Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture: David Walter Banks

Atlanta-based photographer David Walter Banks, whose book "Trembling Earth: A Transcendental Trip Through the Okefenokee" was published by The Bitter Southerner in 2025, will give the Odum Environmental Ethics Lecture as part of the university's annual Humanities Festival. The lecture is presented by the Willson Center for Humanities and Arts and the Environmental Ethics Certificate Program in partnership with The Bitter Southerner.

Banks's work is held in the permanent collections of the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library at Yale University, the Museum of Contemporary Art of Georgia, and the New York Public Library. His commercial clients have included TIME, Apple, The New York Times, National Geographic, Rolling Stone, and many others, and he has lectured at institutions including Western Kentucky University, the University of Miami, Savannah College of Art and Design, the University of North Carolina – Chapel Hill, and the University of Massachusetts.

For "Trembling Earth", Banks paddled 500 miles and spent 69 nights over three years deep in the Okefenokee Swamp, photographing its wonders and absorbing what he calls "the unmistakable yet ineffably mystical quality of this primordial space." Using in-camera techniques rather than post-production effects and with a highly individual eye for the uncanny and the sublime, Banks created a fantastical, personal essay in 90 photographs that communicate his dreamlike vision of the Okefenokee's unique, awe-inspiring, and precarious ecosystem.

Find more details here: https://calendar.uga.edu/event/odum-environmental-ethics-lecture-david-walter-banks

You may also like the following events from Willson Center for Humanities and Arts:

• Next month, 27th March, 11:00 am, Phinizy Lecture: Rick Atkinson in Athens
• This April, 16th April, 06:00 pm, Book Launch: "Late Heaney" by Nicholas Allen in Athens
• This April, 22nd April, 05:30 pm, Earth Day Lecture: David George Haskell - "How Flowers Made our World" in Athens

Also check out other Arts events in Athens, Festivals in Athens, Fine Arts events in Athens.