From his earliest days growing up in the piedmont forests and fields of Edgefield South Carolina, Dr. Joseph Drew Lanham dreamed of flight. As he writes in his beautiful and deeply moving memoir, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, this longing to join the aerial journeys of the blue jays that stole his grandmother’s pecans and the crows that invaded his father’s cornfield, led to Dr. Lanham’s lifelong dedication to studying birds and to exploring what it means to be a ‘rare bird’ himself: a black man in a field that is overwhelmingly white and an ecologist finding freedom through wildness on land where his ancestors were enslaved. While the cardboard wings he made as a child never achieved the skyward paths of the feathered beings he studies, his work — both academic and literary — has uplifted and inspired people around the world, and elevated and illuminated conversations about race, nature, history, freedom, and the power of birds.
In Dr. Lanham’s field of wildlife ecology, loss and hope are yoked. Since 1970, scientists estimate that three billion North American birds (nearly one in every three) have vanished — a staggering loss includes many backyard species that we have long taken for granted: sparrows, warblers, finches, blackbirds. In his research, Dr. Lanham has focused on the impacts of forestry and other human activities on the lives and disappearance of birds, butterflies, and other small forest creatures. You don’t just hear and see these animals, Dr. Lanham has said. You feel them, and when they’re gone, their absence is akin to the absence of a lover or a friend.
Lanham has written extensively about the deep and often overlooked connections between how we treat nature and how we treat our fellow humans. In 2013, he published a groundbreaking essay called “9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher” that conveys the very real dangers that he and Black birders face–dangers brought to the national spotlight earlier this year from Christian Cooper’s assault while birding in Central Park. Racism and driving other creatures to extinction, Dr. Lanham says, are both built on the corrupt human belief that some are worthier than others. For humans and animals alike, he has said, “the fine line between life and death” is “defined by how intensely we care.”
Yet hope is also a driving force behind much of Dr. Lanham’s work, whether in conservation or his exploration of race, science, and the land. “Hope is the thing with feathers,” Emily Dickinson famously wrote. And it’s hope — for nature’s ability to heal wounds, and for the power of art and experience to inspire people of all colors to understand the moral obligation we have to treat the living with care — that propels Dr. Lanham’s prolific writing, teaching, and fieldwork. As an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, poet, and author, Lanham melds heart and mind to, as he writes, “move others to find themselves magnified in nature, whomever and whatever they might be.”
In this episode, we speak with Dr. Lanham about how bird lives and Black lives intertwine in the story of the Carolina Parakeet, the language-defying joy of watching swallow-tailed kites, and the birds that are bringing him joy and hope during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Books:
Articles:
Forever Gone (Orion)
Birding While Black (LitHub)
Nine Rules for the Black Birdwatcher (Orion)
Nine New Revelations for the Black Birdwatcher (Vanity Fair)
The United State of Birding (Audubon)
Listen & subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Soundcloud | Spotify | Stitcher | Google Podcasts