Tribune’s Outdoors editor wins award for his reporting on environment

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.