Contemporary Authors

• The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature Milkweed Editions (Minneapolis, MN), 2016

• Clemson University - http://www.clemson.edu/cafls/faculty_staff/profiles/lanhamj

  J. Drew Lanham

  Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology
  Forestry and Environmental Conservation Department
  Master Teacher and Certified Wildlife Biologist
  Office: 115 Lehotsky Hall
  Phone: 864-656-7294
  Email: lanhamj@clemson.edu
  Vita: Download CV
  Personal Website: http://drewlanham.wixsite.com/blackbirder

  Educational Background

  Ph.D. Forest Resources (Wildlife)
  Clemson University 1997

  M.S. Zooology
  Clemson University 1990

  B.A. Zoology
  Clemson University 1988

  Courses Taught

  Conservation Ornithology -WFB 4760/6760
  Wildlife Conservation Policy - WFB 4300/6300
  Hunting and Wildlife Management - WFB 3070
  Creative Inquiry (Citizen Science/Ornithology) - FNR 4700

  Profile

  J. Drew Lanham (B.A. Zoology 1988; M.S. Zoology 1990; PhD Forest Resources 1997) is a native of Edgefield and Aiken, South Carolina. In his twenty years as Clemson University faculty he’s worked to understand how forest management impacts wildlife and how human beings think about nature. Dr. Lanham holds an endowed chair as an Alumni Distinguished Professor and was named an Alumni Master Teacher in 2012. In his teaching, research, and outreach roles, Drew seeks to translate conservation science to make it relevant to others in ways that are evocative and understandable. As a Black American he’s intrigued with how culture and ethnic prisms can bend perceptions of nature and its care. His “connecting the conservation dots” and “coloring the conservation conversation” messages have been delivered internationally.

  Drew strongly believes that conservation must be a blending of head and heart; rigorous science and evocative art. He is active on a number of conservation boards including the SC Wildlife Federation. South Carolina Audubon, Aldo Leopold Foundation, BirdNote and the American Birding Association. He is an inaugural Fellow of the Audubon-Toyota Together Green initiative and is a member of the advisory board for the North American Association of Environmental Education. Drew is a Fellow of the Clemson University Institute for Parks and was most recently named a 2016 Brandwein Fellow for his work in Environmental Education.

  Dr. Lanham is a widely published author and award-nominated poet, writing about his experiences as a birder, hunter and wild, wandering soul. His first solo work, The Home Place-Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed Editions, Minneapolis MN) will be published in 2016-17.

  Research Interests

  "Connecting the conservation dots" is how I envision my research mission. My past work has focused on the impacts of forest management and other human activities on songbirds, herpetofauna, small mammals and butterflies. More recently I've begun to investigate how ethnicity (especially Black Americans) relate to wildlife and other conservation issues. I'm also interested in how birders and hunters might bridge philosophical gaps to effect conservation in a more holistic way.

  Extension and Outreach

  Coloring the Conservation Conversation is my outreach mantra! This means considering how ethnicity and other factors impact how we see nature and then conserve natural resources. As a birder, I use birds and the conservation issues surrounding them as the inspirational vehicle to connect others to the outdoors and advocate for their protection.

  Publications

  RECENT PEER REVIEWED
  Straka, T.J., J.D. Lanham, and T.A. Brown. 2015. Chopping up the forest: How fragmentation and parcelization represent a related but different set of forest problems. Forest Landowner 74(2):34-38.

  Zachary D. Miller, Jeffrey C. Hallo, Julia L. Sharp, Robert B. Powell & J. Drew Lanham.2014.Birding by Ear: A Study of Recreational Specialization and Soundscape Preference. Human Dimensions of Wildlife: An International Journal 19 (6)

  Lanham, J.D and M.A. Whitehead. 2011. Managing Early Successional Habitats for Wildlife in Novel Places Pp.209-225 in Greenberg, Cathryn; Collins, Beverly; Thompson III, Frank (Eds.). Sustaining Young Forest Communities, Springer Press. NY. 305pp.

  Kilpatrick,E.S, J. D. Lanham, and T. A. Waldrop. 2010. Effects of Fuel Reduction Treatments on Avian Nest Density in the Upper Piedmont of South Carolina. Open Environmental Sciences, 2010, 4, 70-75.

  Kilpatrick,E.S, T.A. Waldrop, Joseph D. Lanham, Cathryn H. Greenberg, Tom H. Contreras. 2010. Short-Term Effects of Fuel Reduction Treatments on Herpetofauna from the Southeastern United States. Forest Science 56(1):122-130.

  O’Keefe, J.M., Susan C. Loeb, J. Drew Lanham, and Hoke S. Hill, Jr. 2009. Macrohabitat Factors Affect Day Roost Selection by Eastern Red Bats and Eastern Pipistrelles in the Southern Appalachian Mountains, USA. Forest Ecology and Management.

• Places Journal - https://placesjournal.org/author/j-drew-lanham/

  J. Drew Lanham is a native of Edgefield, South Carolina, and an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University. Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist who has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion, Flycatcher, and Wilderness Magazine and in several anthologies including The Colors of Nature, State of the Heart, Bartram’s Living Legacy, and Carolina Writers at Home, among others. He is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature.

• National Geographic - http://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/activities/nature/drew-lanham-home-place-memoir/

  Exploring Ties Between Nature, History, and Race
  Naturalist J. Drew Lanham connects birds, race, and conservation ethics in his new memoir—and in an unexpectedly viral video.

  YOU MIGHT ALSO LIKE
  Picture of Wesley Larson carrying a sedated female bear for radio collaring
  A Bear Biologist Brings Online Fans Into the Field
  Picture of Drew pointing into the distance: Lanham leads a group of birders in the field
  VIEW IMAGES
  Lanham leads a group of birders in the field.
  PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY J. DREW LANHAM
  By Kat Long
  PUBLISHED SEPTEMBER 9, 2016
  A lyrical story about the power of the wild, J. Drew Lanham’s new book, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair With Nature, synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.

  Lanham, a lifelong birder, naturalist, and wildlife biologist at Clemson University, grew up in rural Edgefield, South Carolina, on his family’s ranch, the Home Place. Working on the farm alongside his three siblings, wandering through the forests that his father tended, Lanham first noticed birds—blue jays who stole nuts from his grandmother’s pecan tree, wild turkeys that gobbled lustily in the bottomlands, and prairie warblers that buzzed from the shrubby thickets. They became companions and guides for his coming of age, and future career in ornithology (an ill-advised detour into engineering notwithstanding), in a culture still grappling with racial rifts and unpleasant history.

  Today, Lanham’s research focuses on the interplay of ecology, people, and land ethics. But just as important, he shares his love of birds and wilderness as a means to encourage more people of color to appreciate the outdoors and claim their stake in it.

  National Geographic Adventure spoke with Lanham about family legacies, the need for diverse voices in conservation, and his viral video, “The Rules for the Black Birdwatcher.”

  Picture of author J. Drew Lanham
  VIEW IMAGES
  Author and naturalist J. Drew Lanham
  PHOTOGRAPH BY J. DREW LANHAM
  In your memoir, you describe the complex natural history around your family’s farm in South Carolina, and how it is intertwined with your own experience of growing up. What prompted you, as a scientist, to write your story?

  When I was 40, maybe 41, I attended a writing workshop in Vermont. I had gone through the travails of promotion and tenure as a college professor and really thought I had found my rhythm as an ornithologist doing what I truly wanted to do. I was asked to write a place-based essay. I began to write the story of where I grew up. It was a 500-word assignment, and I think I wrote close to 3,000 words.

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  The next morning, when my turn came to read my story, and I broke down and couldn’t get through it. It was the first time I had mourned my father’s death, the first time I had mourned the loss of my Home Place. It was a reconnection to what had made me me. The memoir was borne of that.

  Initially, I kind of balked at the idea of writing about myself, because my whole thing was, “why would anybody have any interest in that? It’s not anything special in its own right.” It still sometimes feels like that, but hopefully, people will be able to share in it.

  Your book has many universal themes to it, though—such as how your environment shapes your personality. Did your instinct for observing the natural world when you were young lead you into wildlife biology as a career?

  Growing up rurally in Edgefield, South Carolina, and with the options of only two and a half television channels and no video games, there was nature all around me, and I noticed it—birds in particular, because birds fly, and I’ve always wanted to fly at some level. I envied birds. I was studying them at a pretty intense level early on, and I had designs then on being an ornithologist. Both of my parents were science teachers, so there was some genesis there too.

  I let guidance counselors know that I wanted to be a person who studied animals, a zoologist and an ornithologist. But, unfortunately, what happened—and I think this happens to lots of kids, and kids of color in particular—is that if you’re good at math and science like I was, then you’re herded toward engineering and traditional STEM disciplines.

  But I look around me at what I do now—and being asked to share my thoughts about ornithology and conservation and culture—I feel like it was a map drawn up somehow. I think about the internal compasses that birds have to help them get where they need to be, and I think there’s a compass inside that’s been guiding me in the same way.

  Along with birds and ecology, your research has focused on the African-American land ethic. Can you talk about what that is and the ideas you’re exploring?

  It started with Aldo Leopold and A Sand County Almanac. One of his most frequently stated maxims is “conservation is a state of harmony between men and land.” I definitely believe that to be true. The extension of that is asking not just “men,” but women and everybody else of various hues and colors and traditions, “well, how do you think about land?”

  As a black man from the South, I’m looking at the historical connections to land, of slavery and oppression, as well as how land has sustained us in positive ways. In the South, and quite frankly across a lot of the United States, there’s a not-so-good history between black folks and land. People were terrorized and killed and forced to serve in ways that were unpleasant. Policies have created disparities for access to the things that we need to manage land. Addressing that directly, I think, is important. But then we also need to look at the good that land has done for us. Understanding history, but then coming forward to illuminate the positive connections between land and black folks, has been, for me, the fulfillment of a personal mission.

  IT’S EVERYBODY’S RIGHT TO HAVE ACCESS TO NATURE. WE ALL NEED IT. TO DENY ANYBODY THAT IS IMMORAL.
  J. DREW LANHAM
  The idea of conservation being a state of harmony becomes a question of how we respond to all of this interplay. That means we’re not making assumptions about how people think about land, or wildlife, or trees, or birds, which I think is one of the biggest sins [conservationists] commit. Once you begin to understand how people think about land, then we can go forward to help people in informed ways. For the Color of the Land project [created as part of a TogetherGreen fellowship supported by Audubon and Toyota], we collected stories of black folks who owned rural southern lands to understand their stories so that I could then, hopefully, help them be better stewards depending on what their desires were for their lands: timber harvest for sustainable income, hunting, aesthetics.

  That effort lives on in my relationship with the Center for Heirs’ Property Preservation [which helps black landowners keep their inherited property and obtain income from sustainable forestry on their land] in Charleston, South Carolina. I provide support there as an ecologist, and inform black landowners about the black land ethic. Part of that is very much about using birds as the messengers between people. We share landscapes, we need the same air, the same water—I try to help them understand that they do have a stake in the conservation conversation. It’s everybody’s right to have access to nature. We all need it. To deny anybody that is immoral.

  Let’s go back to something you touched on just now: the disconnect between conservationists and the communities where they’re doing a lot of their work, which was a theme in your talk at the North American Congress for Conservation Biology in July. How might these different groups collaborate more?

  The first thing for those of us in the conservation community to do is to show our hearts. When you’re trained as a scientist, you go out and collect all this data, you write the manuscripts formulaically, and you publish it, and hopefully 50 people read it. Then you go on to the next publication. We don’t go beyond that to be advocates for the resource. We need to bring conservation science back to a point where Aldo Leopold would recognize it, where we’re connecting head to heart.

  Conservation means care. It’s a long word that you can boil down to four letters—care, and love. It doesn’t mean that we bias the data, it doesn’t mean that we don’t rigorously do analyses. But it does mean that we let people know that we care about what we do. Telling stories is one way to do that. As you build empathy and feeling between populations, things come together and then we can move forward, because those walls have come down some.

  VIEW IMAGES
  The Home Place by J. Drew Lanham comes out September 13 from Milkweed Editions.
  PHOTOGRAPH COURTESY MILKWEED EDITIONS
  The BirdNote-produced video you star in, “The Rules for the Black Birdwatcher,” seems like a way to communicate the need for discussion between people who love nature and people who feel that they’re not welcome in nature. How did the video come about?

  I got an email from one of the editors at Orion Magazine, who asked if I’d be interested in writing a piece. I thought for about 25 seconds and I emailed back to say I’d love to. I started thinking up these rules for being a black birder. Forty-five minutes to an hour and a half later, I was done.

  RULES FOR THE BLACK BIRDWATCHER "Conserving birds and their habitat [is] a moral mission that needs the broadest and most diverse audience possible to be successful," Lanham says.
  The article, “9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher” took off in ways that I didn’t think it would. I’m on the board of BirdNote, an organization that tells wonderful stories about birds, but more importantly, about bird conservation and how we connect to birds. BirdNote said, “birders haven’t thought about these sorts of issues, and here you’re thinking about them. Let’s get it out in another way.”

  I was in Ocean City, Maryland, for a talk, and [producer] Ari Daniel and [videographer] Amanda Kowalski came down from Boston to film the video. We were out in the cold near Assateague Island National Seashore. The incident when the other black birder drives up was unscripted—there was no second take, it was just the way things in my life seem to be going these days!

  I thought that maybe a few people would find it intriguing, but I certainly didn’t think it would go semi-viral. I think it represents the landscape of race in America and how some of us feel not so comfortable in these situations. Combining birding with being a black man is not a common thing in this country, so there are things that I have to think about that other people may not have to think about. Maybe other birders will begin to think about it too. It opens up the door for conversation about more than just birds; it opens up conversation about all sorts of things that we need to deal with as a society.

  I had a question at a film festival where the clip got shown, and someone asked, “I laughed, but did you mean for this to be funny?” I said, “Well, I did, it’s satire, but I guess my goal is for you to laugh, and then think about why you laughed, and then think about why you had to think about why you laughed.”

  I’m sure you have tons of memorable birding stories. Which one stands out for you most?

  I left home in Edgefield two years after my father died, and the land was in dispute at that point. Relatives were sort of wrangling to profit on the land he had managed so carefully for all those years. I had gone back to Edgefield to try to salvage some stuff from my room. The land had been cut over, a lot of the mature forest that my father had carefully managed had been cut down. And it hurt. But then I had stopped at the head of the dirt road that led down to our house, and the car window was down, and I heard a “di-di-di-di-di-di-deet.” It was a prairie warbler, in this habitat that was growing back after all of this cutting. That bird was so close; it was just belting out that climb up the chromatic scale. I had seen prairie warblers before, but that prairie warbler meant renewal, in a way.

  Prairie warblers come in to early successional habitats and sort of recolonize things. They start things again. I felt like I was losing the place where I grew up, and then there’s this bird, as bright as feathered sunshine, singing from this new green spring foliage. It stuck with me. Now there’s nothing more beautiful to me than a prairie warbler in some sort of shrubby, overgrown, thorny, tangled place. That bird was a messenger that put me on the path to where I am now.

• Wildside Nature Tours - http://wildsidenaturetours.com/leaders/j-drew-lanham/

  J. Drew Lanham is a nature-phile. He spends most of his time thinking about nature and trying in some way to make it matter to others. In his nineteen years as a Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University he’s spent a large portion of his career trying to understand how what humans do impacts birds and other wildlife. As a Black American he’s intrigued with how ethnicity—whether color or culture, bends perceptions of nature and how it should be cared for. To that end one of his missions is to broaden the audience of those who see, love and care for nature. He calls this “coloring the conservation conversation”.

  Drew is a native South Carolinian –and a different kind of Southern Son. He loves the region for what it is ecologically — the Blue Ridge mountains shrouded in mist to thousand year old bald cypress swamps and coastal marshes that creep to the sea. Black-throated green warblers in jungle-like mountain cove forests, Bachman’s sparrows singing sweetly in longleaf pine flatwoods and black rails “kiki-kerring” in a Low Country marsh are his home birds. In his avian affections he writes a great deal about southern places. Because nature –birds in particular—are such vital cogs in his being- much of what he speaks and writes about is colored with a southern accent.

  With his B.A. and M.S. in Zoology (Clemson) and PhD in Forest Resources (Clemson), Drew is an accomplished scientist who was recently named a Clemson University Master Teacher and an Alumni Distinguished Professor. He strongly believes that conservation must be a blending of art and heart. He is active on a number of conservation boards included South Carolina Audubon and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He’s been to forty of the fifty states and spent time birding abroad in South Africa and South America. He has a healthy wanderlust and travels extensively to speak on his passion. He has spoken and led tours at major bird festivals including the Biggest Week in American Birding and The Rio Grande Valley Bird Festival. He is widely published as a nature writer and his first solo work, The Home Place-Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature (Milkweed Editions) will be published in 2016.

  Drew and his wife Janice Garrison Lanham live in Seneca, SC. They have two adult children Kimberly Alexis and Donovan Colby. His favorite birds are the ones with feathers. The lifer he most covets is the next one he sees.

• NPR - http://www.npr.org/2013/11/03/242829100/staving-off-confrontation-while-watching-birds

  Staving Off Confrontation While Watching Birds

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  November 3, 20133:00 PM ET
  Heard on All Things Considered
  Host Arun Rath talks with African-American wildlife biologist J. Drew Lanham about his article in the current issue of Orion Magazine, "9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher."

  ARUN RATH, HOST:

  It's ALL THING CONSIDERED from NPR West. I'm Arun Rath.

  (SOUNDBITE OF CHIRPING)

  RATH: I love birds. But honestly, I'm not much of an outdoorsman. So I often engage in city birding, which can be surprisingly rewarding. In Manhattan, I used to watch peregrine falcons hunting pigeons between skyscrapers. There's a drawback, though. Walking around apartment buildings with binoculars in a big city, people are more likely to think you're a pervert than a birder.

  Imagine if some awkwardness and suspicion followed you everywhere you went birding, and you might have an idea what it's like to be an African-American birder. Drew Lanham is an avid birder and professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University. He has an essay in the current issue of Orion magazine called "Nine Rules for the Black Bird Watcher."

  DREW LANHAM: (Reading) Nocturnal birding is a no-no. Yeah, so you're chasing that once-in-a-lifetime rare owl from outer Mongolia that's blowing up your Twitter alert. You're a black man sneaking around in the nether regions of a suburban park at dusk with a spotting scope. Guess what? You're going to have some prolonged conversations with the authorities, even if you look like Forrest Whitaker, especially if you look like Forrest Whitaker.

  RATH: So you mentioned yourself that black birders, to use your terminology, you're an endangered species. I think you said that birding is one of the whitest things that you can do. Why is that, do you think?

  LANHAM: Well, you know, I grew up in Edgefield, South Carolina, kind of in the boondocks, and so, you know, birds were just a natural part of my life. And as I began to watch birds from the second grade onward, you know, I didn't run into anyone who looked like me who liked birds. You know, it just became clear that it was an overwhelmingly white hobby. And I think the data from the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service bears that out.

  RATH: Hmm. One of your rules, you suggest that black birders have an affinity with black birds. Could you break that down?

  LANHAM: You know, I'll read that if I can.

  RATH: Yeah.

  LANHAM: (Reading) Black birds, any black birds, are your birds. Crows and their kin are among the smartest things with feathers and wings. They're largely ignored because of their ubiquity and often persecuted because of stereotype and misunderstanding. Sounds like profiling to me.

  RATH: I always thought crows got a bad rap.

  LANHAM: Yeah.

  (LAUGHTER)

  LANHAM: And they do, Arun. They get a really bad rap, you know? Culturally, they've been seen as kind of tricksters and thieves. And they see them in that way, but they are super smart birds. The research bears that out, you know, complex language and the ability to identify faces on humans. And, you know, going forward and thinking about those black birds and how they are overlooked and how they're persecuted without people really understanding them, you know, I mean, it's easy for me as a black birder to take on a black bird kind of as my totem.

  RATH: You end the piece with a pretty sharp point about how birders should care more about than just counting birds. What do you mean by that?

  LANHAM: Yeah. You know, Arun, there are millions of birders doing things from feeding their birds in their backyards to traveling great distances to see birds. And because it's a hobby that depends on us watching a living thing that's also a bellwether of the environment, I think we're tasked with doing more than just watching and tasked with doing more than just listening.

  And thinking about how we can serve these beautiful creatures as fellow beings on the planet who share air and water and earth, I think it's a critical thing that we think beyond our binoculars to think about conserving those other beings that share our space.

  RATH: Drew Lanham is a professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University and an avid birder. His piece in Orion magazine called "Nine Rules for the Black Bird Watcher" is online now. Drew, thank you.

  LANHAM: Thank you very much, Arun.

The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair
with Nature
Publishers Weekly.
263.28 (July 11, 2016): p56.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text: 
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
J. Drew Lanham. Milkweed (Consortium, dist.), $24 (232p) ISBN 978-1-57131-315-7
In this insightful personal narrative, Lanham, an ornithologist and professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University, recalls his childhood in
rural South Carolina and how it led him into such an overwhelmingly white field. Lanham grew up in the boondocks among pine trees and wild
turkeys. His parents planted and sold "watermelon, cantaloupe, butter beans, purple-hull peas, and an array of other crops" to city and suburban
folks to supplement their schoolteacher salaries. A curious and avid reader, Lanham pored over encyclopedias and saw field guides as "treasure
troves of information: pictures joyously stacked side by side with brief descriptions of what, where, and when." When Lanham began birdwatching
years later, he seldom encountered other African-Americans in the field carrying binoculars, and eventually realized how atypical a
pastime it was for a black man. He was himself "the rare bird, the oddity: appreciated by some for [his] different perspective and discounted by
others as an unnecessary nuisance, an unusually colored fish out of water." He would like to see this incongruity eliminated. Encouraging readers
to pay closer attention to nature, Lanham gathers the disparate elements that have shaped him into a nostalgic and fervent examination of home,
family, nature, and community. (Sept.)
Source Citation   (MLA 8th
Edition)
"The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature." Publishers Weekly, 11 July 2016, p. 56. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA458915364&it=r&asid=cdd8964722301b9ca16ec1b0c3257969. Accessed 6 Apr.
2017.
4/6/2017 General OneFile - Saved Articles
http://go.galegroup.com/ps/marklist.do?actionCmd=GET_MARK_LIST&userGroupName=schlager&inPS=true&prodId=ITOF&ts=1491517248183 2/2
Gale Document Number: GALE|A458915364

• The Collagist
  http://thecollagist.com/the-collagist/2016/10/1/the-home-place-by-j-drew-lanham.html
  Word count: 1182

  The Home Place
  By J. Drew Lanham

  Milkweed Editions
  October 2016
  978-1571313157

  Reviewed by Amber Nicole Brooks

  In The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature, J. Drew Lanham, an ornithologist and wildlife ecologist, explores the American landscape—the literal, cultural, and physical landscape, but also dynamics of race. Lanham asks us to develop a broader and more nuanced view of the intersection of environment and race. The Home Place is comprised of an Introduction and three main sections: "Flock," "Fledgling," and "Flight." After a quotation from Frederick Douglass, Lanham begins with the line "I am a man in love with nature. I am an eco-addict . . ." In the Introduction, he describes himself as a conservationist, makes a plea for the land, and explains how the book is memoir but also "the story of an ecosystem." Although much of the book focuses on characterizing the past, as one does with memoir, and although Lanham names his place as a Black man in the long history of the South as a "Colored Man" in his title, ultimately this book is more about the future, the future of our environment.

  "Flock," the first section, presents Edgefield, South Carolina, the diverse land of Lanham's youth, home to the coast, the Savannah River, mountains, and also Piedmont. We learn of his family—Mama, Daddy Joe, grandmother Mamatha, and siblings. The physical structures, The Ranch and The Ramshackle, exist as family homes but also as contrast. Lanham explains how he split his time between The Ranch and The Ramshackle, where he stayed with Mamatha: "But while those structures were close together physically they were almost a century apart in mindset." So the child of the 1960s and 1970s also grows up in the '30s with Mamatha keeping him "suspended in and in-between world of superstitions, haints, and herbal remedies." In addition to characterizing the setting of his youth, Lanham explores the tensions between two mindsets: being raised to know mystery is okay versus being trained as a scientist, an academic. What is "real" and what is "believable"? Lanham explains:

  I grew up understanding that the mysterious things I experienced didn't all need to be explained. Not knowing everything was OK. But since I last fell under any of my grandmother's spells, I've been trained extensively. Some might even say I've been overtrained, brainwashed to think critically about the natural world.

  In addition to dualities, cycles persist throughout the narrative: seasons, the routine for procuring firewood, farming and harvest, the moon, the temperature, even war and peace. The lush voice and layering of images brings forth a world of its own. Lanham describes the changes in October:

  The season has always drawn a sort of restlessness from me. The Germans have a fine word for it: zugunruhe. A compound derived from the roots zug (migration) and unruhe (anxiety), it describes the seasonal migration of birds and other animals.

  Although The Home Place is its own world, its own ecosystem, Lanham contextualizes the larger society surrounding it through his grandmother's life: World War II Black aviators, George Washington Carver, a man on the moon. His life is one of cultivation, nurturing, and food, but alongside it the larger world is changing. Another contrast emerges: the biodiversity of the ecosystem, of the flora and fauna, versus a city less tolerant of human diversity.

  These contrasts and settings are developed through a careful cataloging and layering. Early in life Lanham is interested in field guides, encyclopedias, rock collections, and wildlife. As a writer and naturalist, he catalogs settings, animals, plants, tasks, routines, foods, and even his siblings in the chapter titled "A Field Guide to the Four." In this field guide to life, Lanham cites Aldo Leopold's idea of a Land Ethic: "In 'Thinking Like a Mountain,' he encouraged us to consider the whole ecosystem, and not tear it apart selfishly for our own ends. Love, Leopold said, was central to the Land Ethic." Through elements of memoir—family drama, fundamentalist indoctrination, loss, grief—this thread of a Land Ethic persists. In tandem, exploring "natural worship" versus manmade worship is also an aim of Lanham's.

  "Fledgling" opens with a chapter titled "Little Brown Icarus" and a quotation honoring the Tuskegee Airmen. Then, the young narrator imagines himself as a white pilot because in his understanding of the 1970's cultural landscape, pilots are white. All of his interests—fighter pilot, ornithologist, cowboy—seem white. Fast-forward to his adulthood, and birdwatchers are primarily white, and visitors to national parks are overwhelmingly white. Lanham writes, "Like most of the places I go to see birds anywhere in the world, these spots are often far off the beaten path and mostly populated by white people. As I seek rare birds, I often find myself among the rarest individuals around."

  "Flight," which contains nine chapters, is the most substantial section of The Home Place. Lanham traces his early research of bluebird mating and other field work. The chapter "Birding While Black" highlights the struggle of being an outsider:

  Society at large has certain boxes I'm supposed to fit into, and most of the labels on those boxes aren't good. Birders have a profile as well, a much more positively perceived one. Bring a birder in the United States means that you're probably a middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated white man.

  Yet, he sees a solution not only to this lack of diversity, but to a larger awareness of the land: "I can prescribe a solution to my own small corner. Get more people of color 'out there'."

  Lanham traces his genealogy and is brought face to face with recorded fact that explains what he already understands, that Black Americans' birthplaces had to do often with slavery of the past, their names having to do, often, with white slave owners. Ultimately, though, the book is about the land as much as it about the man. An important angle emerges from the intersection of these two things:

  But more and more I also think about how other black and brown folks think about land. I wonder how our lives would change for the better if the ties to place weren't broken by bad memories, misinformation, and ignorance. I think about schoolchildren playing in safe, clean, green spaces, where the water and air flow clear and the birdsong sounds sweet. More and more I think of land not just in remote, desolate wilderness but in inner-city parks and suburban backyards and community gardens. I think of land and all it brings in my life. I think of land and hope that others are thinking about it, too.

  Any readers who love the land, love the South, or who may find themselves minorities in their vocation, would enjoy this journey with Lanham. Even more importantly, Lanham implores: "We must rediscover the art in conservation and reorient toward doing and not talking."

• Alabama Public Radio
  http://apr.org/post/home-place-memoirs-colored-mans-love-affair-nature-j-drew-lanham#stream/0
  Word count: 724

  "The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature" By J. Drew Lanham
  By PERSON: DON NOBLE • FEB 24, 2017
  Don Noble's Book Reviews
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  “The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature”

  Author: J. Drew Lanham

  Publisher: Milkweed Editions

  Pages: 224

  Price: $24.00 (Hardcover)

  Although I had never thought about it, J. Drew Lanham, now a professor at Clemson, reminds readers several times during his memoir that there are precious few black ornithologists, in fact not very many black naturalists/biologists of any kind.

  Lanham writes, “I am a black man and therefore a birding anomaly. The chances of seeing someone who looks like me while on the trail are only slightly greater than those of seeing an ivory-billed woodpecker.” He says his choice of career means he “will forever be the odd bird, the raven in a horde of white doves, the blackbird in a flock of snow buntings.”

  Put this way it is amusing enough, but in the chapter entitled “Birding While Black” Lanham tells of times when his working alone as a black ornithologist created some high anxiety. In rural South Carolina, sometimes in the Blue Ridge, in militia country, earning money while earning his PhD, Lanham’s job for the bird census bureau required stopping every half mile then, for three minutes, listening for birds and searching for them through binoculars.

  A Forest Service gate had KKK sprayed on it, a few decrepit trucks did too. Some local houses sported Confederate flags. Lanham could not help but consider some terrible possibilities. Lillian Smith’s book “Strange Fruit” and thoughts of lynching came to mind. A colleague at Clemson joked of his degree “being awarded posthumously.”

  Lanham offers some explanation for the paucity of black biologists. He had himself begun at Clemson as a mechanical engineering major. When a black kid shows skill at math and science, high school guidance counselors, he suggests, steer them towards either engineering or medicine, even if those may not be of primary interest.

  Lanham describes himself as “a man in love with nature…an eco-addict.” He was converted to this through experience of course, but also through reading, especially “A Sand County Almanac” by Aldo Leopold.

  Addressing the larger question of why more African-Americans may not have a more powerful and direct connection to nature, Lanham thinks the roots may be, first, in slavery, where workers had no choice about laboring in the fields all day, and then the era of sharecropping with its exhausting work and economic futility.

  Lanham is himself a child of the land, raised on the family farm in Edgefield County, South Carolina, with three siblings. He was second in line. Lanham described his siblings as birds: brother Jock a raven, a genius; little sister Jennifer a swallow, “a flitting wind-tossed bird”; Julia a falcon, “fiercely loyal.” He describes himself as a hermit thrush, a shadow hugger, shy, OK with being alone.

  His parents were both school teachers by day but so poorly paid that they raised much of their own food, beef included, and sold vegetables at the farmer’s market. Lanham loved it. The work was endless, feeding livestock, mending fences, cutting firewood, but for him it was a paradise.

  His grandmother, who lived to 96, lived on the property. She had wisdom concerning herbal remedies and a rich supply of superstitions as well. “A broom swept across your feet could mean an early death” as might an owl hooting in the yard or a bird trapped in the house. Mamatha spoke with the dead—her house housed a ghost—and conjured, but was throughout a devout Christian.

  Lanham traces his own religious changes from the evangelical Jeter Baptist church with a fierce, terrible God, where education was considered “ungodly,” to Mt. Canaan Baptist which was gentler, more encouraging than fearful.

  No church, however could compare with “the woods and fields where creation was so evident.” I’d say Lanham evolved into a pantheist and would have made a fine companion to Henry David Thoreau on a walk around Walden Pond.

• The Los Angeles Review
  http://losangelesreview.org/book-review-the-home-place-memoirs-of-a-colored-mans-love-affair-with-nature-by-drew-lanham/
  Word count: 772

  BOOK REVIEW: THE HOME PLACE: MEMOIRS OF A COLORED MAN’S LOVE AFFAIR WITH NATURE BY DREW LANHAM
  51CQSA-glVL-1
  The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature
  Drew Lanham
  Milkweed Press, September 2016
  $24.00; 216 pp.
  ISBN: 978-1-57131-315-7
  Reviewed by B.J. Hollars

  In his debut memoir, self-described “eco-addict” J. Drew Lanham explores the connection between trees and family trees, birds and brethren, and most importantly of all, the place where mother nature and human nature meet. Taken together, it makes for a unique reading experience; one in which the book’s meditative qualities far surpass any semblance of a conventional plot. Let the reader be warned, there are no fireworks here—simply the musings of an African-American naturalist who, throughout his lifetime, has trained himself to marvel at the minor. Trust me, that is enough.

  Though the natural world remains Lanham’s main character, readers can hardly overlook his own narrative. Born in the midst of a moment of change in the segregated south, Lanham’s personal story is the story of his family history: a lineage traced back to a slave named Harry first brought to South Carolina around the turn of the 18th century. Yet as Lanham finds, there are limits even to knowing one’s own story, and over time, even the most basic facts begin to fade.

  It’s a problem Lanham has faced in his professional life as a wildlife ecology professor as well. “Day after day, semester after semester, year after year I droned on,” he writes. “Yes, I was presenting the facts. Yes, I was publishing the facts. But it seemed to me that the facts never created motivation to make things better.” Simply put: facts are only ever half the story if they don’t compel change. Yet as Lanham learns, in some instances, facts fail to persuade half as well as mysteries. “…I find myself defined these days more by what I cannot see than by what I can,” Lanham writes. Though the line is offered in reference to religion, readers can’t help but feel its reverberations take root within the subject of race.

  And what, precisely, can Lanham not see? Others birders who share his skin color.

  In his essay “Birding While Black,” Lanham explores his own rarity. “The chances of seeing someone who looks like me while on the trail are only slightly greater than those of sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker.” Likening himself to a thought-to-be extinct species of bird has its intended effect: a reminder to the reader that being in the minority can be felt beyond human institutions. Though Lanham doesn’t use the word privilege anywhere within his essay, that word is often felt. After all, demographically speaking, most American birders are “middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated white wom[e]n.” Perhaps his subversion of the demographic is a result of his own tinge of privilege as an academic—a privilege rarely extended to minorities.

  While the subject of race remains ever-present, Lanham skillfully filters his personal experiences through the natural lens. On the subject of ecology, Lanham concedes that he and his colleagues have “mostly done a poor job of reaching the hearts and minds” of the average citizen. Once more, his pronouncement is flooded with double-meaning. As we try to preserve our natural world, he seems to imply, we can hardly overlook the racially divided world we’ve built ourselves.

  For Lanham, that world began in his birthplace of Edgefield, South Carolina, a “rich refuge for wild things”, though a place in which human dignity has been stunted. Yet despite the customs and politics that have held the place back, Lanham notes that there are still glimmers of hope to be found there. In one instance he recounts driving the family car into a ditch with his young sister on board. In this moment of crisis, a Confederate flag bumpered pick-up truck pulls to the side of the road. Lanham expects his situation to worsen, but in fact, the opposite proves true. “Ya’ll need some help?” a white man calls, and then proceeds to winch the car from the ditch and send the young African-Americans on their way. “We’d been delivered—,” Lanham marvels, “by the people I would’ve least expected to help.”

  Of the many powerful lessons Lanham bestows upon readers, perhaps this last one is his best: proof that human nature, like Mother nature herself, can still surprise us with its grace.

• Foreward Reviews
  https://www.forewordreviews.com/reviews/the-home-place/
  Word count: 341

  The Home Place

  Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

  Reviewed by Scott Neuffer
  August 26, 2016

  A deep and abiding connection to the pastures and forests of South Carolina defines J. Drew Lanham’s remarkable, boundary-breaking memoir, The Home Place.

  A birder, naturalist, and distinguished professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University, Lanham recounts his childhood on his family’s pristine multigenerational ranch in Edgefield County, South Carolina. Conservationist greats like Aldo Leopold become his heroes and inspire in him a strong land ethic and sense of place. The flora and fauna of the ranch take shape in his young mind and provide self-identity and emotional harmony.

  That Lanham is black—in a scientific profession dominated by whites—makes The Home Place uniquely American and uniquely Southern. Lanham relays his experiences with extant racism in the South. In one troubling episode, rural white men in a pickup truck aggressively tail Lanham and a female colleague as they study birds in the backcountry. In trying to understand what it means to be a black naturalist in modern-day America, Lanham digs deep into his own genealogy and the legacy of slavery that still haunts southern states, even underlying the very academic institution where he teaches. These reflections on racial injustice invoke indignation as well as yearning for reconciliation.

  The Home Place is a work of undeniable poetry. Like John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Rachel Carson, and other trailblazers before him, Lanham writes rapturously of the natural world, of its majesty, sublimity, and wonder. He writes of being “colored” by the fields and the soil and the water, both in spirit and manifested in the beautiful hue of his skin. By helping to define a land ethic in a region where blacks have been historically dispossessed of their land, Lanham has created a book of monumental social, political, and philosophic importance. He shows that the land sustains life, yes, but also how it heals and nurtures our shared humanity.