The Lewiston Tribune’s Outdoors editor and environmental reporter, Eric Barker, won the 2019 Dolly Connelly Award for Excellence in Environmental Reporting.
Barker wrote a series of stories about the Snake and Columbia river system that explains the complex policy decisions surrounding the waterways, according to a news release about the award.
His stories capture “the shift from the old debate of dams versus fish to the new reality of a rapidly changing energy market, a changing political atmosphere in Washington and the challenge of climate change,” said Rocky Barker, a retired Idaho Statesman writer, in the news release.
Barker joined the Tribune in 1997 as the education reporter and became the Outdoors and environmental reporter a year later. He was promoted to his present position in 2013.
The award, which includes a $500 cash prize, is named after Dolly Connelly, who detailed the battle of whether and where to build high dams in Hells Canyon on the Snake River 50 years ago.
