COVER STORY
Environmental journalist Charles Seabrook tracks Georgia’s wild places
By Mark Woolsey As a youngster, Charles Seabrook wore out some serious shoe leather roaming among the salt marshes and stately live oaks of his native Johns Island, South Carolina. Those explorations set a pattern for later life- and occasionally got him into trouble. “One day I was coming around a tree and I ran smack into a bobcat,” the veteran journalist recalls. “He wasn’t more than about two feet from
me. I was frozen, rigid. And he was looking directly into my eyes.” After a brief and tense staredown, the big cat turned tail and loped off into the brushand Seabrook started breathing again. The metro Atlanta naturalist is still ambling decades later as he pens the long-running “Wild Georgia” column for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. His love of the written word, natural curiosity and a keen eye for his surroundings have made
him a fixture in environmental and nature journalism in Georgia. The 75-year-old has written books, won awards for his work, gives talks to civic groups and posts nature photos on Facebook. Long before all that, Seabrook had decided that exploring a coastal island was not nearly enough to slake his wanderlust. “My dad had a subscription to National Geographic and I’d read about all these exotic, faraway places and I wished I could travel to them,” he said.
“I didn’t realize just what I had right at home.” He needn’t have fretted about travel. Journeys taking him around the globe would come his way soon enough. A four-year Air Force stint led Seabrook to a base in Texas, where he began taking college courses. He expanded on that after returning to his home state by landing a journalism degree. Soon, he had wangled a job at the Charleston News and Continued on page 4
MAY 2020 | AtlantaSeniorLife.com
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