{"id":22895,"date":"2020-10-12T13:15:33","date_gmt":"2020-10-12T17:15:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/?p=22895"},"modified":"2020-10-12T13:15:33","modified_gmt":"2020-10-12T17:15:33","slug":"rare-bird","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/rare-bird\/","title":{"rendered":"A Rare Bird"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\n <\/p>\n

Drew Lanham receives national acclaim for his memoir<\/span><\/p>\n

 
\nThis spring, Clemson Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology J. Drew Lanham \u201988, M \u201990, Ph.D. \u201997 has been quoted widely in the national media in publications ranging from The Atlantic<\/i><\/a> and Vanity Fair\u00a0<\/i>to Garden and Gun<\/i><\/a> magazine and The Bitter Southerner<\/a>.<\/i> He\u2019s also been on NPR podcasts<\/a> and in Newsweek<\/a>.<\/i>
\nMuch of his visibility has been in response to the Central Park birdwatching confrontation in May between Black birdwatcher Christian Cooper and Amy Cooper, a white woman whose dog was unleashed.
\nA nationally known birder and proponent of increasing diversity among the ranks of birders, Lanham has had his own confrontations with those who see a Black man with binoculars as a threat rather than as another human exploring the world of flight. \u201cMy binoculars have become heavier now,\u201d he said during his NPR interview. \u201cIt\u2019s become harder for me now to pick up my binoculars and singularly focus on birds.\u201d
\nLanham also was lauded in the national media this spring for his memoir, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man\u2019s Love Affair with Nature,<\/em> which was named by The Chronicle of Higher Education<\/em> among \u201cThe Best Scholarly Books of the Decade\u201d<\/a> and by Literary Hub<\/em> among \u201cThe 10 Best Memoirs of the Decade and Then Some.<\/a>\u201d
\n\u201cTo have a work of creative nonfiction \u2014 of nature writing \u2014 recognized in a way that puts it in a scholarly realm is personally important because it validates your personal story, your personal struggles,\u201d Lanham said.
\nThe memoir takes readers back to the origins of the titular love story \u2014 to Edgefield County, South Carolina, where generations of Lanham\u2019s ancestors, dating to slavery, called home and where Lanham began to fall in love with the natural world around him. Through his journey, Lanham never loses sight of the significance of his identity as a Black man in the Deep South and eventually as \u201cthe rare bird, the oddity\u201d of a Black man in the conservation sciences.
\n\u201cLanham explains how much he wishes there were other Black scientists at the ornithology meetings he attends,\u201d wrote Anna Tsing in The Chronicle of Higher Education.<\/i> \u201cToo often, our ideas of what it means to be Black are contained within the life of the city. The countryside is banished; it can only be known for its violence and bad memories. Yet many African Americans continue to live in the countryside, and many in cities are proud, not ashamed, of their rural roots. Lanham\u2019s memoir makes it possible to imagine a confident Black embrace of nature.\u201d
\nLanham called the recognition for his book \u201ca great honor,\u201d not least because he says some in academia view such personal, creative endeavors as antithetical to serious scientific pursuits. \u201cThat validation from the outside is important for any of us at a university. We don\u2019t just want the acceptance of those people we work with \u2014 we all know that\u2019s important \u2014 but what we strive to do is get the science out and get the words out to the world.\u201d\u00a0<\/span>
\nListen to a podcast on Threshold with Lanham.<\/a>
\nListen to a Yale Podcast with Lanham.<\/a>
\nCNN: The realities of being a black birdwatcher<\/a>
\n 
\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This spring, Clemson Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology J. Drew Lanham \u201988, M \u201990, Ph.D. \u201997 has been quoted widely in the national media in publications ranging from The Atlantic and The New York Times to Garden and Gun magazine and The Bitter Southerner.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":22896,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[386,1189],"coauthors":[],"class_list":["post-22895","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-in-these-hills","tag-birdwatching","tag-fall-2020-in-these-hills"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/3\/2020\/10\/Drew-Lanham.jpg","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22895","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=22895"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/22895\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/22896"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=22895"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=22895"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=22895"},{"taxonomy":"author","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/clemson.world\/archive\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/coauthors?post=22895"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}