Discovering Alabama, the public television series that has carried the state’s natural diversity into homes and classrooms for two decades, marked its 20th year on the air in 2005, and it chose Baldwin County as the place to celebrate.
The program scheduled an open house reception for its fans and supporters on Saturday, Oct. 22, 2005, from 3 to 5 p.m. at Dahlgreen Hall on the Fairhope campus of Faulkner State College. Those wanting more information about the event were directed to contact the series’ host, Dr. Doug Phillips, at (205) 348-3553.
A Series Built on Alabama’s Own Landscape
Discovering Alabama’s premise was simple and, in its way, radical for public television in the mid-1980s: that Alabama’s own rivers, forests, caves, canyons, bays and barrier islands were subject enough for a documentary series. The state is among the most biologically diverse in the nation, with an extraordinary range of aquatic species, longleaf pine systems, mountain terrain in the north and coastal marsh in the south. The program set out to bring those remarkable natural wonders to viewers across the state, and it became a staple of classroom instruction as well as living-room viewing.
Phillips, the naturalist who hosted the series and became its public face, was the constant across those 20 years, walking viewers through swamps and up ridgelines with a patient, teacherly manner that made the program as much a civics lesson in stewardship as a nature documentary.
Why Fairhope Made Sense
Holding the anniversary reception on the Eastern Shore was a fitting choice. Baldwin County sits at the meeting point of several of the systems the series had spent two decades documenting: the Mobile-Tensaw Delta to the north, one of the largest river deltas in the country; Mobile Bay itself; and the Gulf beaches and dune systems to the south. For a program about Alabama’s natural inheritance, there are few better classrooms within a short drive.
Fairhope, with its long tradition as a haven for writers, artists and naturalists, and its bayfront setting, has long drawn exactly the sort of audience such a series cultivates.
The Venue, Then and Now
Faulkner State College, which hosted the reception at Dahlgreen Hall, was for decades Baldwin County’s community college, with its main campus in Bay Minette and additional locations in Fairhope and Gulf Shores. Readers looking for the institution today will not find that name on a sign: in 2017, Faulkner State merged with two other two-year institutions to form Coastal Alabama Community College, which now serves students across the region under a single banner. The Fairhope campus remains in operation.
Twenty Years, and the Argument for Public Television
The anniversary arrived at a moment when public broadcasting’s funding was a recurring subject of debate in Washington and in state capitals. Programs like Discovering Alabama offered a concrete answer to the question of what public television is for. The series was not a ratings vehicle. Its value was measured instead in the teachers who used its episodes as curriculum, the students who saw a Delta cypress swamp or a Cahaba lily for the first time on a classroom screen, and the viewers who came away with a clearer sense of what the state holds and what it stands to lose.
An open house reception on a Saturday afternoon in Fairhope was, in that sense, less a party than a small act of institution-building, an occasion for the people who had supported the program to be thanked in person and to be reminded that the work continued.
The Legacy
Discovering Alabama went on well past its 20th year, accumulating episodes that now function as a visual archive of the state’s landscapes, some of which have changed considerably since they were first filmed. For South Alabama in particular, the series documented the Delta, the bay and the coast at a time when development pressure, hurricane damage and questions about water use were reshaping all three.
Two decades in, the celebration in Fairhope offered a straightforward proposition to anyone who turned up: that Alabama is worth knowing, and that knowing it is the first step toward keeping it.