How does the prism of race & ethnicity bend perceptions of wildness? How do birds inspire me to watch, write and revere all the wild there is? How do I connect culture to conservation? Subscribe to Wild & In Color and see my pondering on all these things.
Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves
In gorgeous and timely pieces, Joy Is the Justice We Give Ourselves is a lush journey into wildness and Black being. Lanham notices nature through seasonal shifts, societal unrest, and deeply personal reflection and traces a path from bitter history to the present predicament. Drawing canny connections between the precarity of nature and the long arm of racism, the collection offers reconciliation and eco-reparation as hopeful destinations from our current climate of division. In Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves, Lanham mines the deep connection to ancestors through the living world and tunes his unique voice toward embracing the radical act of joy.
“Lanham is warmly contemplative, righteous, incensed, funny, and grateful. His poetics, knowledge, and dissent run deep; his poems are winged.”
The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature
Winner of the Southern Book Prize • Winner of the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center • Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year • Nautilus Silver Award Winner • Finalist for the John Burroughs Medal
In me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.
Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County, South Carolina—a place “easy to pass by on the way somewhere else”—has been home to generations of Lanhams. In The Home Place, readers meet these extraordinary people, including Drew himself, who over the course of the 1970s falls in love with the natural world around him. As his passion takes flight, however, he begins to ask what it means to be “the rare bird, the oddity.”
By turns angry, funny, elegiac, and heartbreaking, The Home Place is a meditation on nature and belonging by an ornithologist and professor of ecology, at once a deeply moving memoir and riveting exploration of the contradictions of black identity in the rural South—and in America today.
“When you’re done with The Home Place, it won’t be done with you. Its wonders will linger like everything luminous.”
“A lyrical story about the power of the wild…synthesizes his own family history, geography, nature, and race into a compelling argument for conservation and resilience.”
Sparrow Envy : Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts
You are a rare bird, easy to see but invisible just the same.
That thought is close at hand in Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts, as renowned naturalist and writer J. Drew Lanham explores his obsession with birds and all things wild in a mixture of poetry and prose. He questions vital assumptions taken for granted by so many birdwatchers: can birding be an escape if the birder is not in a safe place? Who is watching him as he watches birds?
With a refreshing balance of reverence and candor, Lanham paints a unique portrait of the natural world: listening to cicadas, tracking sandpipers, towhees, wrens, and cataloging fellow birdwatchers at a conference where he is one of two black birders. The resulting insights are as honest as they are illuminating.
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Read: Nine New Revelations for the Black American Bird-Watcher
Vanity Fair
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Listen: Prairie Warbler
This Is Love Podcast
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Listen: J. Drew Lanham: 'Pathfinding Through the Improbable'
On Being with Krista Tippett
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Read: Sunset Camp, Sundown Town: An Interview with J. Drew Lanham
Terrain
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Read: How Urbanites Misunderstand Wildlife
New York Times
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9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher
Orion Magazine
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9 Rules for the Woke Birdwatcher
Orion Magazine
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Staving Off Confrontation While Watching Birds
NPR
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Day 19: A Season of Hope and Feathers
New York Times
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Wildness on a Whim: Reflections on Whimbrel in the South Carolina Lowcountry
All About Birds
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MacArthur Foundation Profile
MacArthur Foundation
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Wilderness, Reconciliation, and Love of the World with J. Drew Lanham
Natural History Institute
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Letters to Birds with J. Drew Lanham
BirdNote
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Rules for the Black Birdwatcher
BirdNote
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![A man wearing a cap, sunglasses, a plaid shirt, and a vest is sitting on an orange stool inside a wooden room with large windows, holding a mug, and looking outside.]()
DEVEAUX BANK: Reflections of a Cultural Ornithologist
Cornell Lab of Ornithology
