Royte shows readers and audiences  how we can all make a difference by learning to recognize our oversized environmental footprint and then taking steps to shrink it — as individuals, community members and voters.  As we continue to exploit and abuse the planet’s precious natural resources, Royte cautions that positive, regenerative change can only be possible if we honestly reassess our relationships with waste, water and our own daily routines.

Program Descriptions

Bottlemania: Big Business, Local Springs and the Battle over America’s Drinking Water

In Bottelmania, one of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 “Must Read” Nonfiction Books of 2008, Elizabeth Royte ventures to Fryeburg, Maine, to look deep into the source — of Poland Spring water. In this tiny town, and in others like it across the country, she finds the people, machines, economies, and cultural trends that have made bottled water a $60-billion-a-year phenomenon even as it threatens local control of a natural resource and litters the landscape with plastic waste.

Moving beyond the environmental consequences of making, filling, transporting and landfilling those billions of bottles, Royte examines the state of tap water today (you may be surprised), and the social impact of water-hungry multinationals sinking ever more pumps into tiny rural towns.

Ultimately, Bottlemania makes a case for protecting public water supplies, for improving our water infrastructure and-in a world of increasing drought and pollution-better allocating the precious drinkable water that remains.

Garbage Land: On the Secret Trail of Trash

Out of sight, out of mind…

Into our trash cans go dead batteries, dirty diapers, bygone burritos, broken toys, tattered socks, eight-track cassettes, scratched CDs, banana peels … But where do these things go next? In a country that consumes and then casts off more and more, what actually happens to the things we throw away?

In Garbage Land, one of The New York Times Notable Books of the Year for 2005, acclaimed science writer Elizabeth Royte leads us on the wild adventure that begins once our trash hits the bottom of the can. Along the way, we meet an odor chemist who explains why trash smells so bad; garbage fairies and recycling gurus; neighbors of massive waste dumps; CEOs making fortunes by encouraging waste or encouraging recycling–often both at the same time; scientists trying to revive our most polluted places; fertilizer fanatics and adventurers who kayak among sewage; paper people, steel people, aluminum people, plastic people, and even a guy who swears by recycling human waste.

Royte takes us on a bizarre cultural tour through slime, stench, and heat-in other words, through the back end of our ever-more supersized lifestyles. By showing us what really happens to the things we’ve “disposed of,” Royte reminds us that our decisions about consumption and waste have a very real impact-and that unless we undertake radical change, the garbage we create will always be with us: in the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we consume.

Bio

Elizabeth Royte’s writing on science and the environment has appeared in Harper’s, The New Yorker, National Geographic, Outside, The New York Times Magazine, and other national publications.  A former Alicia Patterson Foundation fellow and recipient of Bard College’s John Dewey Award for Distinguished Public Service, Royte is a frequent contributor to the New York Times Book Review, a contributing editor for OnEarth, and a correspondent for Outside magazine.  Her work is included in The Best American Science Writing 2004, and her first book, The Tapir’s Morning Bath: Solving the Mysteries of the Tropical Rain Forest, was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 2001.

Wrapped in Rainbows-the first biography of Zora Neale Hurston in 25 years-was published to enormous critical acclaim. It was hailed by Alice Walker as “magnificent” and “extraordinary”; by The Washington Post as “definitive”; and by the Boston Globe as “elegant and exhilarating.” The Southern Book Critics Circle honored it with the 2003 Southern Book Award for best nonfiction of the year.

Program Descriptions

Don’t Go Chasing Waterfalls: The Story of Black Women in Hollywood

In her eye-opening lecture slide program, Boyd takes audiences on a journey into her ongoing research for her forthcoming book, Spirits in the Dark: The Untold Story of Black Women in Hollywood, a groundbreaking study tracing the ­­­history of black women in film and television from the 1920s to the present. Accompanied by a dazzling array of slides, Boyd walks audiences through a gallery of Hollywood’s most important black women players, decade by decade, from Lena Horne to Halle Berry, from Hattie McDaniel to Queen Latifah.

Chronicling the battle for inclusiveness that African-American women have waged over the years, this talk explores how numerous women-mostly as actresses, but later also as writers, directors and producers-have challenged and changed the movie capitol of the world, and how others have been devoured by it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God: The Back Story

In this in-depth discussion, Boyd shares with audiences the impetus and inspiration for Hurston’s 1937 masterpiece, Their Eyes Were Watching God. Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Alice Walker has said there is no book more important to her, and Oprah Winfrey has called the novel her favorite love story of all time. Winfrey even turned the book into a television movie starring Halle Berry. But where did this timeless novel come from? How did Hurston dream it up? It turns out that the love story of Janie and Tea Cake was inspired by the author’s own rendezvous with a younger man in the 1930s. Boyd reveals details about Hurston’s own Tea Cake and delves into the roots of this American classic.

Bio

Boyd is the Charlayne Hunter-Gault Distinguished Writer in Residence at the University of Georgia, where she teaches narrative nonfiction writing, as well as arts and literary journalism. An accomplished journalist and cultural critic, Boyd is the former arts editor at The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and she has been published in numerous anthologies, magazines and newspapers.

Her articles, essays and reviews have appeared in Step Into a World: A Global Anthology of the New Black Literature, Ms. Magazine, Essence, The Washington Post, The LA Times, African American Review and other publications. She founded EightRock, a cutting-edge journal of black arts and culture, in 1990. In 1992, she co-founded HealthQuest, the first nationally distributed magazine focusing on African-American health.