Black folks can’t. I slip on switchbacks and get mired in mucky spots as parts of majority America finally recognize that black and brown skin have been “pre-existing conditions” that killed us in dramatically disproportionate numbers way before the virus did. 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. Should matter. Our task, then, has been pathfinding through the improbable without ending up at the inevitable. It’s a bit of a battering ram baited with honey. We don’t have that freedom. Join renowned author J. How common is this type of work in your field? It is the compounding complications of ignorance, arrogance, and impunity that have made everything worse. I think about land a lot. J. Though quarantined and socially distanced for most of one calendar year and who knows how far into the next, I feel that pressure. Emily Dickinson’s hope has indeed been the rare visitor with feathers, but a cautious optimism rises around common sense and decency after January 20, 2021. The environment suffered too, with deregulation and the re-genesis of newfangled robber barons on Wall Street. That’s enough to keep me going. There isn’t much green space there. I toted slide carousels cross-country for presentations. I used Netscape. You’re a poet, essayist, and memoirist, and this piece melded all those forms. A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. Because, of course, I’ve been on the dark trail since at least November 2016. © 2021 Condé Nast. Drew Lanham in his articles and interviews after Christian Cooper was threatened while birding in Central Park. J. So there was this Zen moment of thinking, and it led to some other of these rules that I’ve now refreshed. [Brian Stansberry via Wikimedia under CC 3.0]. Green means peace. Day after day, from the first week of spring through the midsummer nightmare of swelter, sickness, and protest, I sat after all the Zooming and absorbed the usual cast of characters that brings the world in on wings. There is no empathy, sympathy, or real concern or caring for anything wild or anyone other than someone rich, male, and White. It would be naive to assume that you can just wander anywhere and be accepted. So I got up this morning, and I’d actually posted last night but then I made it private, and this morning got up and just changed the settings. Taking Nature Black® keynote speaker Dr. J. We have 36 more days of denial to further erode the potholed trail we’re on. It’s a plague and a wandering in the wilderness the country can’t get through. [via Twitter]. I think about this for myself, and even more for my young-adult son who sometimes makes late-night visits. There may have been augmented coffee way before 5 p.m. I gave the usual thinking-and-writing assignments to my policy class. 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. Looking at some of the responses online to what I posted, it said, Oh, my god, that was terrible, and did you see that poor dog? Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. I had time, for the first time in decades, to make a full assessment of a place I’ve taken for granted. After a devastating tornado swept through in early April, roofs were covered in blue tarps to keep the rain out. The author’s backyard, September. I was busy raising a family, but “meh” is how I mostly felt. There are 70 million plus who think he was leading them towards some “Great Again” place. J. Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology, Master Teacher, and Certified Wildlife Biologist at Clemson University. I’ve been asked before about that nine—was there something magical you were thinking, something numerological? I feed the birds in at least four seed feeders, two nectar sippers and a suet cage or two. The creative-writing faculty position at Middlebury College, in my adopted writer-haven of Vermont — nixed. Yeah. And I’ve had a relationship with Orion for a while; they were very courageous in publishing one of my first pieces about race and birding and Africa. A hermit thrush skulks in a real thicket of saplings impenetrably bound by honeysuckle vines behind my contrived Thicket, which is itself impenetrable to all but me. It’s all contrived — hostas next to New York ferns. Now, winter is here again; and the death toll soars beyond a quarter of a million; and the collateral damage of joblessness, homelessness, and poverty rates further demoralize a nation; and unarmed Black people continue to die at the hands of the police; and even though millions marched in the summer streets to insist that Black Lives Matter, 45 has defended confederacy, teargassed peaceful protests, and rolled back environmental policies to feed a political base hungry for superiority at any cost. Peter! You can find all programs on this website. I got a call from the Orion magazine poetry editor. I did not expect to be transported by a plant growing in a diesely tree-bed, a few feet from a dreary phone store and our steamy local laundromat. 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. And I sat, and within 45 minutes to an hour, maybe an hour and a half at most, I was sending copy back to her. It has felt like destiny. 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. Sundown. We have dogs in our home. Many of the trees that didn’t get their tops twisted out in the cyclone had already had limbs coppiced to make room for the sagging electric lines. Christian Cooper’s video went viral, and it was a stark illustration of Lanham’s work. I don’t even know why nine rules, why not 10, 13, there could've been more. Ad Choices. Share on Facebook Share on Twitter Add to Calendar A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. A few remnant white-throated sparrows whistled their melancholic yearnings before May Day, when they went back north to someplace with loons and wolves. And black people should not be birders, or in some spaces, is some of what we’re fighting here. Police and racist institutions acting with impunity, killing at whim. of the black-throated greens rising from evergreen rhododendron, the pandemic menaced in faraway places. Each breath is a loan reclaimed with interest, and the next not guaranteed. On the hill, there isn’t the disposable time to sit and watch birds. And she decided that she would threaten him with the police because he was black. It was my own Sane County Almanac published to immediate peer review. The backyard is the antithesis; as secure and isolated a place as I know without going into some wildness. The male has this black hood that circles this yellow face and this push-button dot of an eye, and it just has this ringing song that’s instantly recognizable. [Unless otherwise noted, photographs were taken in the backyard by J. The landscape and politics of New York City after Hurricane Sandy. I long for traveling partners along the troubling trail. Was the process on Saturday similar? All rights reserved. Read Dr. Lanham's piece below, and sign up to hear him at the TNB Conference at bit.ly/2FJI8m8 Viral spread, racist prejudice, and a presidency premised on lies and violence: The antithesis to these plagues is the backyard as birding preserve. Students are invested in the courses by Valentine’s Day, in that the chance has passed to drop without a record on their transcripts. In a different way than I can with almost anything else. Lacking insurance, money-strapped, or both, people on the hill make do — or don’t. Drew Lanham, dreamed of flight. The terrain doesn’t “offer thin air vistas or many bare rock spires,” he says. The whitetail bucks are rut crazy, chasing does. I can honestly say I'm less fearful walking in forests and in places where I know there are four-legged predators that can kill and eat me—I am less fearful in those situations than when I recognize the lights of a police cruiser trailing me for no reason. I have the privilege of a job that allows me to work from home; that automatically pays me as if I’m showing up; and doesn’t ask if I do so with binoculars or a cold beer from breakfast in hand. 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. When he leaves, I always warn him, “be careful! He’s the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature and a forthcoming collection of poetry and meditations, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts. Should I not go there? 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. 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’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. And I wanted to hold my breath with—I mean, I was absorbing every note of that bird’s song. I likely won’t fly to events before fall 2021 or January ’22. Birding is often described as a kind of escape, and your work shows where that’s not the case—where human problems are mirrored in birding. pop! I workshopped with writer friends on Mondays and Fridays. I offer the in-class liberty of free thought with endless multiple choices. Nine New Revelations for the Black American Bird-Watcher | … Screenshot of Fall Audubon Talk: “Black Birders and the Deep South,” sponsored by Alabama Audubon, with (from upper left) Audubon staff members Meg Ford and Sarah Randolph, and panelists Corina Newsome, Dr. Rashidah Farid, Christian Cooper, Dr. Drew Lanham, Jason Ward, and Christopher Joe, November 18, 2020. 'Dead is the new black': Man writes heart-wrenching poem about … 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. Drew Lanham! I mean, I’m 6’3”, 250 pounds; this guy was 5’10”, 160. I’m a self-described “Straddler” — born smack dab between the last generation of Boomers and the first X’ers. Drew Lanham’s The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. It was really sort of the nexus for my voice and being more outspoken about what I was seeing and feeling. 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. Wilson Biodiversity Award - BirdWatching So how do I feel at the end of 2020? And this last Saturday, I was back up at the same spot, and I was watching this bird called a hooded warbler, this beautiful little citrine yellow bird with this olive green back. [The article was led by Clemson researchers Harrison Pinckney and Corliss Outley.] In January 2020, when warning signs of the viral pandemic loomed, he denied it all, on tape. I forgot dates. And that’s when I did. 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. So all of those things that I wrote in 2013 were things that I’d lived and thought about. 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. Fear that those tasked with serving and protecting will do neither for me or for my adult child, and that our Black bodies can be discounted by a cop who decides it’s time for my son or for me to die. This article reflects our new policy of capitalizing “White” as well as “Black” when referring to racial groups. After all, there were days when I was back there for five or six hours in the same seat. Looking back, I see a trail that mostly fell away after me, rotted boards on a swinging bridge that splintered and fell as I made my way across. All Programs are free, and no registration is required. My water features are plastic or cement, with streams of recirculated water sucked up and regurgitated by cheap electric pumps. But they won’t, and the degree to which I resent this is a soul-rot that doubles down on my doubts.

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