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[Unless otherwise noted, photographs were taken in the backyard by J. A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. This past Saturday, partly in response to the killing of Ahmaud Arbery by two white men in February, he wrote an update to his 2013 list, which Vanity Fair is publishing today. J. The birds and assorted beasts — chipmunks, gray squirrels, Carolina anoles, garter and black rat snakes, moles, fence lizards, cottontail rabbits, rhinoceros beetles, skinks, snails, and a kaleidoscopic insectary of at least ten butterfly species — seem to like it. Time will tell if the grade inflation results in some environmental-policy malfeasance or bird-misidentification crime. She was trying to weaponize the police against a black man, knowing full well what she was doing.”. Read Dr. Lanham's piece below, and sign up to hear him at the TNB Conference at bit.ly/2FJI8m8 By the time Clinton and Bush’s son were done with the ’90s and early 2000’s, I was mostly numb. When I was watching that hooded warbler, I didn’t want to breathe. And that’s really what it comes down to: It’s the transgression of a perception of who we should be. Or find the usual excuses to procrastinate? You sometimes have people who want some kind of evidence, and there it is. A few dared utter the term “post-racial” on that glorious November night in 2008. I gave the usual thinking-and-writing assignments to my policy class. From one evening in 2016 to November 2020, we were mired in traumatic stress disorder. In the time it’s taken for birds to stitch hemispheres together in northbound migratory journeys, to make more of themselves, and then to turn in autumnal flights south, enough people have died as a result of the viral plague to earn citations by future historians and demographers, alongside the bubonic plagues and the 1918 flu pandemic. I made a confession of sorts — first internally, then increasingly to a social media world — that fear, boredom, and uncertainty were finding bouts of reprieve in the backyard. Lacking insurance, money-strapped, or both, people on the hill make do — or don’t. What prompted you to write that piece in that form in 2013? J. My thoughts ran flush — would I actually use the seven-day interim to catch up on grading? This year, by late February, news streams were filling with rancid political rant and unfamiliar terms — COVID-19, novel corona virus. Ad Choices. Because, of course, I’ve been on the dark trail since at least November 2016. From his earliest days growing up in the piedmont forests and fields of Edgefield South Carolina, our guest, Dr. J. Look out for deer — and the police…” He assures me that he knows the drill. I may have some knowledge of that place that says, No, I don’t think so. We don’t have that freedom. The creative-writing faculty position at Middlebury College, in my adopted writer-haven of Vermont — nixed. [via Twitter]. I don’t even know why nine rules, why not 10, 13, there could've been more. In that instance the birds sort of become kind of a distant memory that I have to return to because that’s part of what grounds me and gives me some relative peace, as long as I’m in a place where I feel like I can mostly concentrate on them without someone tailing me or watching me or questioning my intent. J. There were many days when I had no clue what day it was at all. Black Lives Matter supplanted COVID for a good portion of the summer, even as the virus continued to rage and kill — just like the police. Police and racist institutions acting with impunity, killing at whim. But the ornithology group is usually still struggling with Carolina wren-call variations or why I would ask them to write haiku to learn field I.D. Sundown. Those of us tasked with actually standing in lecture halls and labs, amid clouds of human breath, were thinking otherwise. The heightened consciousness of nearby, spliced into the writing and reading about wildness and friends’ quarantined lives, forced me further into the depths of a home that I’d lost touch with. Administrators tried to quash faculty rumors of an online finish for the term. Millions took to the streets in mostly peaceful protest around the world. I’d always enjoyed those enumeration pieces, and I never thought of writing one, and she said, “Well, you know, you could write something about birding and maybe your experiences as a black birder—just run with it. I used 5 ¼” and 3 ½” floppies. I long for traveling partners along the troubling trail. I have to research it very little because it’s always there. But between bouts of dry-eye screen-staring, I was still watching birds in my backyard. Yeah. I was trying to take a picture of it deep in these shadows. The author’s backyard, September. There are times in writing litany that you feel like you’re not breathing, and you feel like if you take a breath, you’ll lose the thought, you’ll lose the words, you'll lose the flow. But then we can gather around birds in a way that transcends everything for the moment. The material on this site may not be reproduced, distributed, transmitted, cached or otherwise used, except with the prior written permission of Condé Nast. Support independent nonprofit public scholarship on design. A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. Well, what I understand that Christian did was, Hey, lady, you know your dog’s breaking the rules? Bird migration was picking up and a trip to the coast might refresh me enough to spend a day doing actual work. I’m an ecologist well-versed in eco-nativist kneejerk: Eschew anything not born of North America and your specific region, lest you commit the eco-sin of encouraging invasive exotic proliferation. I’m almost 30 years in with my odd pedagogical commitments — conservation law and bird love — and it’s come down to a tradition of my own self-motivation. That’s what happened there: I didn’t want to lose the flow. The protests for equal justice go on, and Black Lives still don’t matter to enough people. Still, spring break sounded sweetly tantalizing. We read and exchanged projects, gave one another advice and chatted about all the bad befalling the world. All made up to seem “naturey,” just like Central Park except the Black people get to stay. The convergence of the plagues concentrated what I’d been feeling already; a sometimes-suffocating angst that wakens me long before the birds do, to lie in quiet, stomach-roiling worry. Maybe this is what it felt like for those Egyptians in Genesis, beset by calamity after calamity because they pissed off God by enslaving the Hebrews. J. And I wanted to hold my breath with—I mean, I was absorbing every note of that bird’s song. [Unless otherwise noted, photographs were taken in the backyard by J. Our first selection is J. Use of this site constitutes acceptance of our User Agreement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Privacy Policy and Cookie Statement (updated as of 1/1/21) and Your California Privacy Rights. I was actually in a patch up near the mountains. And so last night was just—man, it was this next straw on this broken camel’s back, of being black. Drew Lanham honored ‘for his passion and creativity in the fight to protect the wild creatures we share the Earth with.’ birdwatchingdaily.com Ornithologist J. She’d given me two weeks. Disintegrating landscape ties and discarded fence posts make raised beds that grow weeds better than tomatoes or wildflowers. As many assumptions are. (Four with climate change.) There isn’t much green space there. The mill has long since closed, and rusting Chevy pickups with their hoods raised in eternal salute to disrepair are docked on cement blocks. It wouldn’t happen in neighborhoods across the tracks. If this sounds hyperbolic, a fiction stranger than truth, then you must’ve somehow hidden under one of the rocks the rest of us had to find our way around. Gun sales and membership in White supremacists’ organizations went up when the White House went Black. I workshopped with writer friends on Mondays and Fridays. Vanity Fair: Have people been reaching out to you about the 2013 piece? The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J. I see culture and conservation as inextricably linked and hope they’re catching on. So, I made it up as I went along. I resent these things. His newest book, Sparrow Envy: A Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, is forthcoming from Hub City Writers Project in 2021. Not what we mapped or planned. Students are invested in the courses by Valentine’s Day, in that the chance has passed to drop without a record on their transcripts. Hundreds of thousands of acres of rich habitat exist now because of Black people bound to the land by a racist institution. Within a few days, Christian Cooper, a Black birder and personal friend, was verbally assaulted by a White woman in Central Park, who tried to use race and the police as weapons. I wore the same running shorts for days at time, while taking turns, above the waist, amongst two or three presentable collared shirts. It’s December. After a devastating tornado swept through in early April, roofs were covered in blue tarps to keep the rain out. In his first year in office, I sank deeper in, and knew that we were being infected with something insidious way before any kind of biological pestilence arrived. And I breathed. Those predators, those sharks, swim differently in the water. The whitetail bucks are rut crazy, chasing does. Through these sessions, I got a chance to compare my southern Piedmont place to Long Island, Montana, and another southern Piedmont place. could be called friends of anybody Black or anything green. And I’m a dog lover. It’s a new nine rules essentially, but they’re really sort of these revelations that I struggle with as a black man in this country sitting in my backyard watching birds, but even wondering if I’m safe in my backyard after Breonna Taylor was killed in her home. I cannot just watch the birds in gusts of heavy wind that blow through my backyard on the edge of a weather front without thinking of the barriers that persist. That week, I did watch birds, but mostly locally. J. Then came the report of Breonna Taylor, murdered by police as she slept in her Louisville apartment. I love poetry, I love birds, and I love the magical spaces where birds and poetry intersect. Drew Lanham published his “9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher” in Orion magazine. Taking Nature Black® keynote speaker Dr. J. I’ve been at one of these birding festivals with another black birder, and, my god, there’d be thousands of people there and five or six black people at most. The cancelled events began to call in for remote rescheduling. That came to a pretty ripe boiling head last night. There’s the evidence of everything that happened, of someone essentially threatening you with police as if the police were the weapon. Drew Lanham, 2020.]. A step out the sliding back door, through the screen porch, and there’s green. But all the traveling I usually do in May and June, following birds north and speaking and reading about connections between their heroic flights and our own plights — all that was delayed or canceled. Most of them, at that point, show little true understanding about why I teach Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac (1949) and Marvin Gaye’s 1971 environmental anthem Mercy Mercy Me (The Ecology) as essential convergent texts in conservation philosophy. There is no empathy, sympathy, or real concern or caring for anything wild or anyone other than someone rich, male, and White. Wherever you feel like going with it.” And there we were in 2013, fresh off of Trayvon Martin. Drew Lanham, a Clemson University ornithologist who has worked to make conservation science more compelling, relevant and inclusive, is the 2020 recipient of the Center for Biological Diversity’s annual E.O. Mid-March 2020 doesn’t seem so long ago. You’re a poet, essayist, and memoirist, and this piece melded all those forms. Join Facebook to connect with Drew Lanham and others you may know. It is the compounding complications of ignorance, arrogance, and impunity that have made everything worse. Drew Lanham will be joining young Black birdwatchers for the second session of Birding While Black: A Candid Presentation, hosted on National Audubon Society's page and as part of #BlackBirdersWeek. Projects by Field Operations, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha, and Stoss: Landscape Urbanism. But individual disposition might be the thing that gets us from one marker to the next. Our task, then, has been pathfinding through the improbable without ending up at the inevitable. I’m still depending on birds to bring joy, and to generate an endless list of must-do, might-do, and wanna-do to keep my hands busy. In addition to his duties as a professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University, Lanham has continued to write on race and birding, including in his 2016 memoir, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair With Nature. It has felt like destiny. And I can pick those lights out, whether it’s an old Crown Vic or a new Dodge Charger. But there were times in Drew Lanham’s mostly engaging and heartfelt memoir when I wanted to beg him to stop. Drew Lanham, 2020.] I think about land a lot. It is surrounded by Chinese and Japanese privet that were here when we arrived and have since grown to 20 feet tall and can’t-see-through thick. Pit bulls are the preferred pet, and on too many days one can hear the staccato pop! He's a poet and a writer who addresses race, culture, and relationships to … Drew Lanham on Christian Cooper and Rules for the Black … Class was mercifully over. Christian Cooper recorded her incensed reaction: Amy Cooper frantically shouted at him, called the police, lied about being threatened, and repeatedly emphasized on the phone that he was African American. It’s a plague and a wandering in the wilderness the country can’t get through. So there was this Zen moment of thinking, and it led to some other of these rules that I’ve now refreshed. J. Today at 4pm PST (7pm EST), Dr. J. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and conservationist Rachel Carson, the inspirational spark for the modern environmental movement. Brains whir and hearts feel. Christian Cooper’s video went viral, and it was a stark illustration of Lanham’s work. I warn eco-fundamentalists about the less than perfect situation and let them condemn me if they will. J. At first it was interesting, in a dystopian way; a click-a-link and peer-into-personal-space thrill. News of a possible pandemic flowing East to West dissipated, mostly, into tweeted diatribe, mixed with my worry about teaching another overloaded wildlife-policy lecture class with no teaching assistant, and another field lab with no research assistant. But, also, last spring seems agonizingly distant, in the way that one recalls the worst kind of wandering journey. I wasn’t so foolish. I responded to this one woman and I said, “Yeah, and she would’ve just as soon as strangled or had this man hanging from a tree. And that we’ve been fighting. Landscape designers are pioneering new ways to regenerate urban waterfronts. So much is preventable and fixable, if Americans would just think and feel beyond hate and self. Drew Lanham is a Clemson University Master Teacher, Alumni Distinguished Professor, and Provost’s Professor in the Department of Forestry and Environmental Conservation.As a Black American, he’s intrigued by how ethnic prisms bend perceptions of nature and its care. I’m lucky. Northern cardinals sang as if red might get redder. But also, now, I’ve had the time, tied tight by quarantine, to concentrate on this little patch of place. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. The few black birder friends that I have, we sort of share war stories. So for someone to say, “I’m gonna call the police on you, black man, and tell them that you are assaulting me, or that you have offended me”—there’s a good chance, based upon our news stream, there’s a good chance you’d have the police knocking on your door asking you to prove that you didn't do what someone else said you did. As I see it, fear and resentment define the last three-quarters of the year more than any other emotions. And then one night in 2016 everything went sideways. But the distinctive part of a hooded warbler is its hood. The ecologist and writer discusses the viral Central Park video, and how the hobby is only an escape for some. I became aware of Dr. J. It’s fully being itself in its habitat now. Some do. Drew Lanham wins 2020 E.O. You find yourself sometimes almost psychologically bowing to show that you’re not being aggressive or that you have no ill intent, and so it’s this game, this internal gaming that is tiresome. Author, naturalist and Clemson University Wildlife Ecology Professor J. More than likely, though, I’ll not kill a deer but take instead some peace of mind gathered in wildness beyond my backyard. It’s very white. I didn’t want to see 100 hooded warblers at that point in time, I wanted to focus solely on that one hooded warbler. Drew Lanham 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. Pictures of grosbeaks, frogs, plants eating bees, clouds, all fit to a few words shared with a few thousand “friends,” kept connection vital without virulent spread. It was really sort of the nexus for my voice and being more outspoken about what I was seeing and feeling. J. And it took me a while to find the bird and I finally found it, and there it was, back in the shadows just singing its guts out. You can take him over here, and your dog can be perfectly happy in this space where it’s supposed to be. It was my own Sane County Almanac published to immediate peer review. Are others watching me as I watch birds? I’ve only counted three so far. But I sort of inhale deeply, just deep belly breaths with birds that help me be in that place, so to focus on one bird for a long time is an important thing for me now. The people in the buildings with the columns and carpeted hallways tried to reassure parents and students that all would remain normal. I don’t care. You try not to dwell in them, but you end up dwelling in them. But then normal is some long-ago thing we passed on the old path. That’s a lot of traffic walking roughshod on a shitty road. You’ve estimated that birding is 90% white. I forgot dates. Honestly. But they won’t, and the degree to which I resent this is a soul-rot that doubles down on my doubts. What’s going to take me or some family member or beloved friend out? Me and my house became a here-and-now control in an experiment of others-and-elsewhere. In 2013, the writer, ecologist, and birder J. In other words, two natives and a northern transplant from a low-wage, small-business-killing mega-retailer. Contrary to the persona I’d crafted, wild Black man living in remote idyll, I’m a Black suburbanite, living in a declining middle-class Upstate South Carolina neighborhood not more than a mile from a working-class “mill hill” where true poverty is apparent. Vanity Fair may earn a portion of sales from products that are purchased through our site as part of our Affiliate Partnerships with retailers. I felt like in writing it that I held my breath. They had to endure seven blights. Drew Lanham finds himself spending more time a... lone hiking the Southern Appalachian’s Blue Ridge escarpment in South Carolina. The environment suffered too, with deregulation and the re-genesis of newfangled robber barons on Wall Street. How common is this type of work in your field? View the profiles of people named Drew Lanham. And that’s when I did. Ecoregions of South Carolina, as defined by the United States Environmental Protection Agency, 2002. You can find all programs on this website. Yes, “working remotely” — but mostly looking and thinking. I remember being on a bus and these people calling me by this other black birder’s name. — George Washington Carver. I go back to Ahmaud, and a citizen’s arrest was the claim that these people had: that they were following him, and this man was suspicious, and that they were stopping him, and that they shot him because he resisted their vigilante arrest. Those are all signals for me, man. That’s enough to keep me going. It’s all contrived — hostas next to New York ferns. It’s all one thing. This year, of course, was different. That was important to me, that one bird. Should matter. Eventually, the obvious links between Black enslavement and avian conservation in the South Carolina Lowcountry rice fields become clear. Green means peace. I think about this for myself, and even more for my young-adult son who sometimes makes late-night visits. I have been a heretic. It was also a confession that I don’t live in the midst of the wilderness I worship. There’s nothing back there any decent landscape planner would approve of. And in the midst of COVID, that’s no small thing. And people who could tell the differences between these birds, who for most of the public would look the same, were not taking the time to notice the difference between these black people. The political havoc and racial injustices of the other two plagues will not be noted by comparable magnitudes of numbers lost, but by an immeasurable toll of pain and misery inflicted on mental well-being. Land rich and cash poor — I’m not sure where the saying originated, but here in South Carolina, I’m keenly aware of its meaning. We’ve been asked to hack our way with rusted butter knives, to navigate with a half-empty Bic lighter, walking with plantar fasciitis and no map or soothing automated voice telling us when to turn left or to stop at the cliff’s edge before tumbling off into the abyss. Laura's Birding Blog: "Life in Hand," a new poem by J. Hosted by Corvallis Sustainability Coalition , Corvallis-Benton County Public Library and 3 others clock I bird with friends from time to time, but I really found the time that I get to spend alone with the birds, it’s a communion of sorts. The next semester looms and I don’t feel confident about meeting in classrooms yet. Although these people are my neighbors, I live a different life. There are some lovely old black cherries I could call a “grove” if my hand was forced. Looking for more? I venture out every other day or so to a nearby patch where the winter sparrows scratch in brown fields of tall grass. And that’s the way these things are. For more on this editorial decision, see A Note on Usage. [EPA via Wikimedia via CC0 1.0]. There were nine. I mow infrequently and never rake fallen leaves. Professor Lanham’s presentation describes a black naturalist’s improbable journey in a largely white field. I have some colleagues at Clemson who just published a paper today, coincidentally, on play and race in public space. pop! Wilson Award for Outstanding Science in Biodiversity Conservation. George Floyd was murdered under a Minneapolis policeman’s knee in the same overwhelmingly oppressive news cycle. Even so, I recognize how much has dripped to erode me since mid-March. This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged. Not one but three trips to my fantasy-next-life state of Montana — called off. If you go to so much of the work, and you look at issues of, for example, Last Child in the Woods, and what that means—it means different things for different people, obviously, based upon social condition, or where they live, rural versus urban, but so much turns on race, and it’s a critical thing. Dr. Lanham is a professor at Clemson University, but his work goes far beyond the academic. I got a call from the Orion magazine poetry editor. While observing backyard birds, I’ve spent almost as many hours pondering my singular identity as a Black man and the pestilent privilege of White impunity perpetrated since 1619. We’re being stalked by the specter of suffocation that renders each breath in a precious gift. It feels lonely at times even though I know millions who look like me can empathize, and millions who don’t look like me try to work shoulder to shoulder as allies. “Woke” wasn’t anything but a word for being un-asleep in the Obama years, but it did feel like the nation had somehow awakened to live out bits and pieces of the creed Dr. King spoke of. I remember landlines, dialup modems, the wonder of faxes, and waiting for film to be developed at now-extinct corner drugstores. Indeed, I feel it in newly acute ways, in an emergent political climate that says 401 years of suffering aren’t enough. I could no longer look to flight schedules, hotel stays, or gigs leading bird walks and doing readings to help me know where I stood in my own circadian rhythms. I feel lucky that family and most friends made it without plunging into the pit. “You’ll need the photo ID to convince the cops, FBI, Homeland Security, and the flashlight-toting security guard that you’re not a terrorist or escaped convict.”. Though quarantined and socially distanced for most of one calendar year and who knows how far into the next, I feel that pressure. [Brian Stansberry via Wikimedia under CC 3.0]. Yet I do contrive sometimes to make a point. We have 36 more days of denial to further erode the potholed trail we’re on. to one another — but never took up residence. There are people who are studying some of these issues writ large. And after I had taken so many snaps of the bird—and it was in shadows, the light wasn’t good—I felt like I had absorbed that bird. I awake with these things on my mind, mixed up in all the tiny responsibilities of first-world adulting, and I’m groping my way again on the treacherous path. On Monday in Central Park, another black birder, Christian Cooper, asked Amy Cooper, a white woman, to leash her dog in the Ramble, as required by the park and as needed to protect the birds there. There’s a mulberry that draws in catbirds, waxwings, and summer tanagers like a magnet; a paper birch I bought at a big-box store and planted because I love the bark. When he leaves, I always warn him, “be careful! Then, in 2008, Barry Obama arrived and the plain was suddenly fruited! 10 Likes, 0 Comments - PottstownRegionalPublicLibrary (@prplibrary) on Instagram: “Just added to our collection—the adult selection for @longwoodgardens community read, “The Home…” After the plague descended, I lost days in the backyard. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. In fact, I am possessed by it. I bemoan petty problems and bitch to people with “-ology” degrees about much that’s inconsequential. If they did the basic work, they all got A’s. There are hard times yet to come and that trail will be a stony one to tread. Drew Lanham My rating: 3 of 5 stars I love adjectives as much as anybody, and more than most. More painful than any other years I can recall, there hasn’t been a day in the last months where anything sure outpaced the uncertainty. I’ve almost mastered the hyperspace landscape and even host my own writing workshop now; the usual circle virtualized but still exchanging words and feelings. Time (beyond some online meeting) attenuated, because it’s hard to be late for the dining-room table or a side-yard meeting in my Thoreauvian-esque writing shed, a.k.a. New vaccines may come online in record time and I will trust the science — but the COVID plague continues to selectively stalk certain prey with fatal efficiency, and I’m in that herd. I wanted in that process to then be able to exhale. Drew Lanham! We have dogs in our home. But as some citizens weaponized themselves and occupied state capitols without pause or retribution; as self-deputized vigilant “citizens” continue to profile Black people innocently jogging or birding in public parks; as the pressures are exerted on Living while Black, any purchase gained on slick ground gives way again. Maybe, for them, my fantastical idea of Rachel Carson and Martin Luther King strategizing about environmental justice seems too farfetched. They will be made live according to the posted schedules on this home page, and …

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