THRESHOLD CONVERSATIONS

J. Drew Lanham

AMY: Welcome to Threshold Conversations, I'm Amy Martin, and my guest today is Dr. J. Drew Lanham.

MUSIC

DREW: I can't separate the air, the water, the soil, the Earth, from my inalienable rights to life, liberty, and some pursuit of happiness.

AMY: Drew Lanham is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University. He's also an author and a poet who writes about his experiences as a hunter, a wanderer, a birder and a Black American. His award-winning book, called The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature, was published in 2016. It traces Dr. Lanham's path to becoming a scientist and a naturalist, starting with his childhood, when he bonded deeply with the land, water, plants and creatures of Edgefield County, South Carolina. When he was 12, he happened upon a copy of A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold, and he credits reading about Leopold’s concept of a land ethic, in which values of love and respect are incorporated into how we think about nature, as changing the direction of his life. Dr. Lanham went on to serve on the board of the Aldo Leopold Foundation among many other conservation organizations. In 2019, the National Audubon Society honored him with the Lufkin prize, which recognizes individuals who have dedicated their entire lives to the environment. Drew Lanham, thank you for joining me today on Threshold Conversations.

DREW: Great to be here, Amy. Thank you for having me.

AMY: I’m a budding bird nerd, I'm curious, what is your favorite bird?

DREW: Right now I have a special place in my heart for loggerhead shrikes. You know, the bird that, that many people know colloquially as the butcher bird. So it's, it's a songbird, it's a passerine, but it's also very raptorial. And so, it will capture insects like large grasshoppers and, and such, but also small mammals like shrews and mice and occasionally smaller songbirds. And because it has weak feet, it will impale its victims on spikes and spines and barbed wire, which is a sort of a morose, grotesque thing. But because it's a bird that I say code switches, much like some of us have to code switch between cultures, workplace, and home, friends and professional peers. I like shrikes. So right now that's my favorite.

AMY: What does it look like? 

DREW: Well, if you can imagine, a Northern Mockingbird-esque kind of appearance. So it's a bird of gray tones overall with black and white in the wings, so that when it flies, it almost looks like a checkered flag. And so it has this sort of diagnostic, shallow wing, beat, rapid wing beat, and it has a hooked beak that looks very raptorial. And along with that hook to beak, it has a black mask. So a very distinctive bird, perches upright, on, on it's sort of its century posts and it's a bird that's declining. So that makes it special as well. It's a bird that has been persecuted for, for a long time in part because people see it as, they see it as a bird that's, that's harmful to other songbirds and they don't like its character as a predatory songbird. So again, for me, in the way that I try to see birds, Amy, it's, it's a bird that suffers undo persecution, and those birds are very special to me. So, because they, it helps me as a Black man relate to these birds in this very different sort of way. I think they give, we share, we share, unfortunately, some of those same roles, so loggerhead, shrikes, are one of those birds that suffers because of that perception.

AMY: Hmm. I'm going to look it up.

DREW: You know, they're, they used to be really common, all over, across most of the United States. And, and again, they've suffered in part in the early portion of the 20th century, they were openly persecuted and along with many raptors, hawks, and falcons and the like, but now they're suffering from habitat loss, probably pesticide use and that kind of thing. So I've been paying a lot of attention to shrikes when I see them.

AMY: Well, I'm, I'm really eager to get into all of these weighty issues that are so at the fore right now. And I want to ground our conversation in your story, starting with your childhood in South Carolina, which you write about so beautifully in your book, The Homeplace. One of the really fascinating figures, to me, in the book is your paternal grandmother. I wonder what comes to mind first when I say “tell me about Mamatha.”

DREW: Wow. Tell me about Mamatha, my whole life really I think every day, I think about her and her influence. I grew up with her on the homeplace really. My, my mother and father agreed to let her keep me. She only lived about maybe a little more than a quarter of a mile away from my parents house. And in a really kind of almost falling down house, I call the ramshackle in the book. I call my parents' house, the ranch, but mamatha, which is this, that name came from mommy Ethel. Her name was Ethel Bell Jennings Lanham. And, I could not say Mommy Ethel as a child. And so it became Mamatha. And, so from, you know, less than a year old until I was 15, I spent roughly half of my life with her. I, I stayed over there. I slept over there and then I would, I've been a lifelong migrant, it seems. I would, I would migrate to my parents' house and they would drive us all to school. And then I'd come home, do chores, eat dinner at my parents' house, and then migrate back to my, my grandmother's house to mamatha’s house to sleep and do chores. And so she had as much influence on me as anyone in, in my parent's house, really. Because she, she sort of laid the groundwork for who I am in, in many, many ways. And I'm only coming to appreciate that, you know, sort of in this late midlife, discovery of self. So I find myself quoting her more and more. I found myself sort of hearkening back sometimes to recipes that, that she used.  I'll use names for birds that she used. So she used to call eastern kingbirds "bee martins." She called yellow billed cuckoos "rain crows." So you know,  I find myself falling back into that. So thank you for asking she had, she had everything to do with who I am now.

AMY: And you do such a beautiful job in the book of evoking, her complex personhood, and, and the rich physical landscape that you grew up in. When you think about your grandmother and your parents, you know, it feels in the book, like they were very much shaped by that place and, and then you, you as well. What are some of the things that you think are distinctive about Edgefield County, South Carolina, that show up in them and in you?

DREW: Well, Edgefield is a unique place. I mean, ecologically it sits in the Piedmont, which is really sort of the foot of the mountains, in a way, but, but really sort of a broken country now. It was, it's at the fall line, which means that it sits at that place where the rivers began to tumble, precipitously seaward. So it was a place at one point in time that was kind of a frontier because some of those falls and shoals kept people really from going northward. But, it was a place that became farmland. It wasn't a great of a place of huge plantations, but certainly, enslavement was an important part, sadly of what went on in the Piedmont with cotton farming, especially, but more small tract farming than you would find towards the coast where people were, were cultivating thousands of acres, and rice and cotton. But that, that Piedmont place is, is unique and that's where my grandfather of many greats, Harry, was brought, probably about 1790 from the mid Atlantic to, to, to help the Lanham boys, the white Lanham boys grow cotton after they had farmed out the mid Atlantic from tobacco, they had burned up the soil. And then where I grew up on the homeplace, roughly a 200 acre farm, was just this wonderful patchwork quilt of farm, fields, forests, the creeks, the bottomland that would flood from time to time. Wild turkey, white tail deer, songbirds, bobwhite quail, and, and, and so that, that place, that historically my ancestors were bound to by chattel slavery became a place that we were bound to, by sustenance. Because most of the meat that we ate, most of the vegetables that we ate, all of the water that we drank came from a spring there, we raised our own cows and hogs and vegetable gardens, and my father hayed the fields and grew corn for the cows and for feed. So, you know, it was this, it was this sort of self-sustaining operation in many ways. Both my parents were teachers, but they were also farmers. So it was this, this sort of bi-phasic life of, of living very close to the land daily, drinking water that had no taste of chlorine, eating vegetables that had no taint of a can, understanding that your food came from the ground and walked around in front of you, and then going to school in Aiken County, where my parents taught envying my friends, because they had sidewalks to skate on and skateboard on and paved roads on which to ride their bicycles. And I learned to ride my bike and my siblings and I learned to ride our bikes on dirt roads. We had dirt clod wars. You know, there were, there were no streetlights. And so it was in many ways an idyllic upbringing. It was very isolated, socially, in many ways. So, you know, we had to depend on one another for company. I depended mostly on wild things, on wild animals and wandering in the woods and fields and creating sort of my own fun in many ways, Amy, between my, my grandmother's ramshackle and in my parents' house. So all of that made it a very special place. It made it, you know, and when you depend on the land, you come to love the land in a, in a very different way.

AMY: One of the most evocative chapters in the memoir to me was the one called “Whose eye is on the Sparrow?” And tells a story of you receiving your first BB gun. And I wonder, if you could just walk us briefly through that story and, and kind of what you, you got out of that experience. Do you remember how old you were when you got that gun?

DREW: Yeah, I, I believe I was 10 when I got my first BB gun, a Daisy Cub. It was, it was the, the Daisy Cub was the cheaper version of the Red Rider. And I had been asking for one for a couple of Christmases and, and when I finally got that, that BB gun, I remember that, that cold morning. I specifically put on these, these clothes that would make me feel at least like some sort of frontiers. I had this brown corduroy coat with a white, pile, cotton pile collar. And, and I put that on. And I tucked my, my jeans inside my boots because that's what a, a trapper or some other explorer would do. And I went out and I spent a lot of time just walking around that Christmas morning before breakfast, and then after breakfast, I couldn't wait to get back out again. And I remember you could, there was this distinctive sort of "phht" you know, is the air compressed that chamber and the spring flew floor forward, and you can actually see the BB leave the barrel and you could see it arc, right? And so that was useful because it, you know, it taught me hold over. It, it taught me that I had to aim slightly above what I was shooting, and so in short order, I became pretty proficient. You know, I was killing tin can after tin can, I was knocking off pine cones. And after a while I, I went a field and I thought, okay, now I'm going to hunt. You got to hunt something. And I remember walking into my parents' front yard and there were, there was this, it's a huge tree now, but there was this small pecan tree. And there was a bird that had perched about halfway up this, I don't know, 20 foot tall tree, it wasn't very tall at all. But I can, I can remember seeing this bird just so neatly sitting there inviting me, it seemed, to shoot at it. And, and so I, I cocked my, my rifle, laid my cheek on that stock and, and fired and, sort of horrifically watched in slow motion, watch this, this BB, hit this bird. And I could hear it just the “thwack,” and the bird fell to the ground and fluttered, and then didn't move. And, so, I hadn't, I had no idea what that was going to be like, you know, to, to have, I mean, I was killing tin cans and pine cones and so this little bird that I hit and it was a chipping sparrow, that I had killed, I, I immediately felt remorseful because I had no plans. I wasn't going to eat the bird. And, and so I buried this little bird. I remember, it felt like I was trying to hide some sin. And so I buried it on the edge of the yard and this little shallow scrape and covered it over with dirt and leaves and then went inside. And I didn't, I didn't, I didn't take my BB gun out again for days. You know, I'm a hunter now, I hunt primarily white tail deer, and I, I don't hunt things that I'm not going to eat, you know, that's the deal. Right. But, but then I had, no, I had no sense of that ethic. So that, that morning was a huge lesson for me, Amy, in that, life is a precious thing that you don't take cavalierly.

AMY: Yeah. Well, reading that story like I said, it was really an emotional story for me. I could feel your, I could feel your excitement and, and the sudden shock and pain, and I, I think that was really brave of you to, to like bring people into that whole experience and knowing that, you know, you had said earlier in the book that you were really influenced by Aldo Leopold. I, I wondered when you came upon his work later in the, and especially the, the story of the fierce green fire dying in the eyes of the wolf that he killed when he was a much older man and had a, sort of a similar experience. Did you, did you make the connection when you read that of like, Oh, that's kind of like, what happened to me with the sparrow or, does it, does it feel connected to you? Cause it sure did to me.

DREW: Well, thanks for making the connection. I, you know, Amy, you're the, you're the first person to do that. And when when you said it, yeah, it connects, but I had never thought about that maybe as my, you know, as my moment and thinking like a mountain, you know, in that moment and sort of thinking like a, a sparrow, but, but it, it was an important moment for me and I remember writing that and, and it took a turn for me in remembering it and it still does. You know, I, for a long time I was a turkey hunter and not a very good one because in part during the spring turkey season, there are lots of other birds in the woods that I would, that I'm constantly watching and looking at. And so wild turkeys are amazing eyesight. So they would always make me, I was good at calling turkeys in, but I wasn't good at closing the deal. And the one or two turkeys that I ever killed in, you know, almost 30 years of turkey hunting. It was always not as satisfying eating that bird because a wild turkey is very wiry and the legs are almost inevitable and I felt like I had wasted really so much of this animal just for a small portion of meat. So, I don't have anything against people who hunt birds, but it's, it's more difficult for me if I'm not going to eat something. So, you know, Leopold's story that evolved over decades for him to realize that thinking like a mountain, and killing that, that wolf did not mean more deer, that it meant that the mountain might suffer. That, that for me, the ethic of understanding that there's this sort of implicit deal that, that, I've kind of made with animals in that the only way that I'm going to take your life is that ultimately I'm going to give mine back to you. So, you know, my, my wish is that when I'm done, that, that I'm burned and that, you know, my, my ashes and up somewhere to maybe at the base of some oak tree or it's a drip line, so that ultimately I become the acorns that ultimately become the white tail, some, some future white tail buck who's who, who may be who's whose ancestors I killed while I was hunting and consed, but then ultimately that circle is complete. I can, that deal, I can, I can live with, because I know I'm going to ultimately die and become the creatures that whose livesI took. But that, that story still, still chokes me up a little bit, because again, it was as a kid, you know, you're out there and lots of kids have lot, lots of kids used to have BB guns and they'd go out and shoot robins and things like that. But I can just, I can vividly remember burying that sparrow, and wondering, wondering if God saw me, but then putting that gun in the corner and not touching it for a very long time. 

AMY: Well I’m going to fast forward a bit into your story now. I'm going to quote you back to yourself here. I thought this was such a poignant line that you write, "most of my life has been ruled by convention, an attachment to certainty, and trying to meet everyone else's expectations." And one of those expectations, as I understood it was that as an academically gifted Black student, that you were supposed to become either a doctor or an engineer, is that, is that right?

DREW: Oh yeah. Yeah, that was, that was the expectation.

AMY: Was that from your teachers or from your parents?

DREW: Well from, from, from teachers mainly, and then, you know, my father died when I was 15. And so, yeah, the expectations of teachers of guidance counselors was it a Black kid who was good in math and science, you could make a lot of money being an engineer. No one even knew, hardly anyone even knew, what an ornithologist was. When I would talk about majoring in zoology, people would be like, Oh, so why do you want to be a zookeeper? As if that was all that I could do. But because, I was always good at jumping through hoops, because I was always good at following orders. I followed orders for a very long time because it was the path of least resistance and I was being rewarded for it.

AMY: Mm. What, what turned, what turned you from that path when you were you're on your way to becoming an engineer? And as I understand it, you were just like, kind of walked across campus one day and entered a new building saying I'm going, I'm going the biology route instead, but I knew it was more complex than that. Can you just speak to that? How, how did that happen?

DREW: Well, Amy, it, it, in, in some ways it was more complex. I mean I tell people this was a decision that was wracking me because I wanted to be independent. I was paying my own way through school. That's one of, one of my core values is, is independence. I, I don't like depending on others and I certainly didn't want my mother to be stressed with, with the cost of school. Certainly not that soon after my father had died. So I was in engineering for three and a half years, hating every moment of it. I would go on these internships in the summer at the Savannah River Site,a nuclear facility. And I was making a lot of money as a kid in the mid and late eighties. But I would go to my internships and I'd, I'd have a calendar. And every day I would count the hours until I could mark an X through that day so that it would be over it. I would watch the clock. It was like watching my life tick away, knowing that I needed, that I should have been doing something else. And so that, that spring day when I was on the way to a class and just stopped about halfway there—just stopped— and turned around and walked back. And, sat, sat with the blinds down, turned the TV on, watched cartoons and ate bowl after bowl of fruit loops. It, it, you know, I couldn't do it anymore. I was dying. And I think that those years have served me well in that. I always tell people now that whatever you do, if you're passionate about it, you'll be successful. But if you're you're, if you're dispassionate, if you're just sort of going through, the script, so to speak, then, then ultimately that script is going to fall apart. And you're going to become resentful of your own life, you'll become resentful of others, and that's not a good thing. So, so that day that I turned around, I mean changed my life. It's, it's why, you know, we're here talking today. I don't, I, I, I think critically about that time and I'm not sure, I'm not sure I would still be alive if I had not turned around.

AMY: Wow.

DREW: For any number of reasons, I don't think, I don't think I could have mentally withstood sort of the continued pressure of living up to others' expectations. I don't think my body would have been healthy enough to sustain me. I think the stress would have been a contributing factor to an early demise, like it was for my father. So, you know, it's, it's never, it's never too late. I think it comes, it really comes down though, too, to making a decision on a walk somewhere and saying, you know what, I can't do this anymore. I'm going to do what I love to do, and then doing it.

AMY: And for you, that was, was birds.

DREW: Yeah, it was, you know, I had walked through this building long haul from time to time. And I would see pictures, posters of animals, or I would see, a skeleton or a snake skin. And the, and it just smelled different. You know, it smelled like an old biology building, the engineering buildings didn't smell like anything. They were sterile. There was no life there. Mmm. And it, I mean, it smelled like calculus, which calculus smells like steel desks and pencils and graph paper. And the biology building smelled like life happening. Even if it was life gone past, it was life happening. So Dr. Sid Gautreaux, he's a famous ornithologist and still a great friend, a mentor of mine, I met him, I met my undergraduate advisor, Jim Schindler, who is a limnologist from Minnesota, and I met Dr. Patty Gowaty, an eco-feminist who had a lot to do with how I think as a scientist and as a human being. And so those three people immediately embraced me. They didn't ask why I was there. They didn't discount me because of my color. They didn't say, well, you, you should be doing this. I told them what my heart's desire was and they made it happen. They helped make it happen. So three people who were very different from me, but very much like me, really helped me move into this place of—you know, we were talking about shrikes earlier—they helped me move into this place where I wasn't code switching daily. I didn't feel like I was, I had to be one person in the engineering building than another person you know, someplace else. I felt more like me.

AMY: I'm curious, in terms of your classmates, when you switched, did you go to an even whiter cohort or was it more diverse when you moved into natural sciences?

DREW: Oh gosh, it was, it was whiter. You know, there, there were, there were Black kids in engineering because, you know, most of us had been recruited to Clemson at that time. So many of us have been recruited there as engineers, you know, and it was, it was the hot major. All of my, my frat brothers were, most of them were in engineering. Most of the people I knew were in engineering. But when I got to this place where there were people, fewer people who looked like me, but people who felt like me and thought like me, it was easier for me to make that adjustment. I felt like going into zoology, I regained my heart and so I went from struggling in a major that I hated, to speeding through a major that, I think the only class I truly did not like in my zoology major was probably biochemistry. So, so yeah Amy, it was, it was less diverse, but it was more inclusive.

AMY: Mmm.

DREW: It was, it was an opportunity for me to blend my heart with other kindred spirits. So it was, again, like I said, it was a lifesaving decision that I made.

AMY: We’re going to take a short break and then continue with the rest of my conversation with Drew Lanham. If you’re just finding us, you might be interested to hear our adventures with bison, our explorations of the Arctic, and more. You can check it out by subscribing to Threshold wherever you get your podcasts.

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SPONSORSHIP ANNOUNCEMENT: BIOLITE read by JOE LOVISKA

Welcome back to Threshold Conversations, I'm Amy Martin, and today I'm talking with author and ecologist Dr. J. Drew Lanham. In 2013, he wrote a piece titled "Nine Rules for the Black Birdwatcher" for Orion Magazine.  

AMY: If people aren't familiar, I'll just read the first one, , is, "be prepared to be confused with the other Black birder. Yes. There are only two of you at the bird festival. Yes. You're wearing a name tag and are six inches taller than he is. Yes. You will be called by his name at least a half a dozen times by supposedly observant people who can distinguish gulmots in a blizzard, and then you go on, carry your binoculars and three forms of identification at all times, don't bird in a hoodie. And, and it, it's, it's funny, but it's also painful. And it, it speaks to all of the racism that, that you've had to face as a Black birder. And I just wonder, can you describe some of the journey you took toward writing this piece? Because this came out whatever it was six, seven years ago. What was your experience as a Black birder, like that led up to this, to this really incisive piece of writing?

DREW: Well you know Amy, I mean, I thought about it, I'd lived it, you know, I have been called the “other birder” by name with a name tag. You know, I have been stopped and detained and asked for my ID. You know, I, I have had, most of those things either happen or I've thought about them happening, which means that it occupies headspace, that I could be otherwise using to distinguish confusing fall warblers. Right. But I'm thinking about where I am. I'm thinking about how people are gonna respond to me. So I don't get to use all of my headspace for birds. I have to think about my identity. And more importantly, I have to think about how other people are thinking about my identity and that's part of what race is about. Right. You know, I can't remember the exact quote, my friend, my friend, John Lane brought it up to me the other day, but James Baldwin made a statement about, that, that all we really want as Black people is to be, to be left alone, to be who we are, to not sort of be picked at, to be persecuted, to be picked out, to be persecuted. So, you know, and it's funny because I, I told him, I said, you know, that's sort of my definition of “wildness’ to be left alone, to be oneself. And, and that's, that's part of the reason that I admire birds because they are who they are. And unless we decide to somehow bias our perceptions of them or who they are, you know, they can, they can go through their lives being the best, you know, painted buntings that they are, no one says, I don't see a painted buntings color, but, you know, people will excuse their biases by saying, “Oh, I don't see color.” Well, that's sad. So, you know, that, those nine rules, , I lived them, I have thought about them. They, they, and they still occupy my headspace. So, you know, there, there are still rules that I, that I kinda, that I kind of live by. And yeah, I put on a hoodie or a time or two, but I'm, I, I would not dare walk through especially a white neighborhood in a hoodie. And give someone the chance to call the police on me because of suspicious behavior, because we see that happening.

AMY: Yeah. Yeah. I mean, just in the last two, three months, we had Breonna Taylor killed in her own home by police officers. Ahmad Arbery killed while out running unarmed. Of course, George Floyd's murder. And on the same day that George Floyd was killed, Christian Cooper while out birdwatching in Central Park had his race weaponized by, by Amy Cooper. I want to play a few seconds of the recording from that event, and for people who haven't seen it, you're going to hear the voice of Amy Cooper, a white woman, who is responding to a request from Christian Cooper, a Black man, to adhere to the signs instructing people to keep their dogs leashed. And as you listen to this, you need to know that Christia is not approaching Amy at all during this call. In fact, at the beginning of the video, she approaches him, and he asks her to back off.

CHRISTIAN COOPER: Please don't ...

AMY: She moves away, and he stands totally still, at a distance, as she makes this phone call.

AMY COOPER:....

AMY: So, this video has been viewed more than 40 million times so far. Amy Cooper has since lost her job and been charged with filing a false report, which is a misdemeanor punishable by up to a year in jail. Drew, I'm wondering how you found out about this. Did you, did you just come across it in your, in your news feed or did someone tell you about it, or do you remember how this came to your awareness?

DREW: Yeah, I, you know, social media, someone tagged me and I, I know Christian, we had done a radio show where we had been, both of us had, had, been interviewed on a, on a New York radio station, on a local station. And so, wonderful man that I had a chance to, to, to have a conversation with. And I, I birded in Central Park last June. You know, it's one of the meccas, but that was going through my feed and someone just tagged me. And I remember looking at the video and then shutting it down and I didn't really go back at it. And then, I took a day the next morning I posted. And so at this, this point in time that I decided to respond, everything was coming down, George Floyd was dead. You know, I was already sort of in this wake of Ahmed Arbery and Breonna Taylor, and it was all just sort of this very morose, morbid Groundhog Day, reliving it. And just tired, just exhausted. And for the moment, I was like, man, people are dead. How, how do I deal with this, this assault really that Amy Cooper threw against Christian Cooper, somebody that I know? And then I began to think, you know, if, if this had not been in the midst of COVID in New York, at that time, dealing with the pandemic as it was at peak, if the police had responded what might've happened? Because then Christian's got to explain what he's doing. It may not have gone well.

AMY: Yeah.

DREW: So it's all sort of this, I don't know, kind of braided river kind of thing. But ultimately braided rivers end up in the same place. And everything ended up in the same place at that point, Amy and I could do nothing more than sort of live in it. So that's kind of where I am now in living in this sort of sad, mad, scared place of, of not of being uncertain of, of still living my heart from the perspective of doing what it is that I've always wanted to do and being an ornithologist and having birds be my life and being able to write and talk about them. But at the same time, being a Black man in a country that discounts me daily and ultimately has made a habit of discounting me by making, making people who look like me dead. So, it's, they're hard days to, to smile or find joy.

AMY: I, I think that some people, white people who haven't been forced to think about this through their own life experience, the way you have, might not understand the connection between the Amy Cooper incident, the Amy Cooper assault, as you accurately describe it. And George Floyd's murder. And obviously I'm not saying these are the same thing, but there is a relationship between these two things.

DREW: Wow. Yeah. It's, I mean, it was almost like it was scripted. You know, I talk about scripts and, and we have scripts in our heads and our hearts and, and hate as a script and, and just as love as a script. And, and her first, her first take was to hate her first take was to use what she knew was a dangerous weapon against Christian, you know, I mean, let's think about it. You know, gasoline is an essential thing that fuels a car, right? In a, in an internal combustion engine, gasoline fuels a car and it's important. It's what we absolutely need. And so in that way, blackness is who we are, it's our identity, right. It defines much of our internal combustion engine as a people, but then when people use that against you, it's taking that same gas and throwing a match at it. And that's what Amy Cooper did. Amy Cooper knowingly threw a match, , at a very combustible, sort of identity, at least as far as this country is concerned. She was invoking death, that's why I call it an assault. And part of the way that I guess I have departed from my grandmother's teaching is that I have no room in my heart to forgive hate, because it's not adaptive. I think I'm at a point in my life and I think maybe, you know, for us to understand that, you know, a late apology from someone because they've lost their job because they've lost their dog, that it's too late. And that, that until the pain of, of not changing becomes greater than the pain of changing, you're going to remain the same. And so to me, to forgive Amy Cooper, you know, I can't do it. It may be I'm the lesser person for it, Amy, but I just can't do it, because she needs to pay for what she did. She needs to be uncomfortable. She needs to be so uncomfortable that that script gets torn up and thrown out of her heart. And, and, and, and that she begins to think differently.

AMY: And through her, hopefully a lot more people.

DREW: Yes, yes. Hopefully that's the, that's the hope. There's some days that I'm hopeful, you know, about it there, unfortunately right now, there are lots of days where it's just sort of against a Groundhog Day, you know, as we heard about Elijah McLean, and what happened to that young man, I mean, it just sort of brings back up this hole, again, this morbid Groundhog day. And so you spend day after day waiting for the next body to fall. So birds, you know, in that, that my nine rules take on, for me, they take on a different sort of tincture at that point.

AMY: I think the thing that, that incident, that assault really, I felt like revealed, put on display in a way that I, I hope people really grapple with is just how much all of this is about power, how she, for whatever reason, you know, She didn't like being told what to do. She didn't like being told to follow the rules that everybody else had to follow. And so her, in her grasping for power, she grabbed the, this violent weapon. 

DREW: She verbally knelt on his neck. You know she, you know, she certainly assailed his identity. And so when, when you, I mean, it's assault, it's, it's, it's, you know, it's an assault. Racism is many things perhaps most insidious is its assault on the soul. And, and, and the way that it wears on you, that most people can't see. You know, the way that it just sort of chips away, it's sort of like an underground current, that you can't see. And then suddenly there's a sinkhole there because everything underneath it has been eroded away and just carried to some other place. And, and I think, you know, there are a lot of sinkholes just waiting to be exposed, unfortunately, in our, in our society. The, the key is trying to, now, I think trying to anticipate some of that, trying to heal where you can, trying to stop the underground flow of racism and hate and bias and misogyny, all those things that our country has been built on.

AMY: One of the things that's happened in response to all of this is some pretty inspiring online organizing. It started with Black Birders Week, there were thousands of Black birders posting pictures of themselves out in the field, and then that led to Black Hikers Week, Black Botanists Week, Black in Nature, and more. Were you part of Black Birders Week at all?

DREW: Yeah. I got to participate. That was a phenomenon that I got to participate in. You know, it was, it was conceived by, by people like half my age and, and it speaks to sort of the leverage of social media and, and, and young people who really have a, you know, a different tool than we've had. I mean, there've been several of us, you know, working at this for a long time, so it's not a new movement. But I think the movement was enlivened, certainly leveraged, by social media. And I think a lot, is still a lot of this story is still to be told. You know, it was a wonderful week, in many, many ways, but what I'm, I'm eager to see is conservation organizations especially, how they carry through with it, that they just don't grab the low hanging fruit of a week and photo ops. That their policy changes, that their mission changes, that most importantly, where their money goes, changes, follow the money and you'll understand the mission. And, and so, I'm hoping that that week, Amy, is leveraged into something much more powerful, because again, it's sort of like, you know, and I tell people I don't celebrate Black History Month because I live a Black history life. So I don't want people to think that that week was just sort of this low-hanging, very sweet, black berry that they could grasp and be nourished. That they need to nurture that, that fruit, they need to nurture other fruits. And that, that's what I want to see. And that's what I want to see. That's what I want to see.

AMY: So I guess just to wrap up here, , I just like to bring it back to, to Aldo Leopold, one of your, one of your inspirations, as I understand it, and, and this whole notion of a land ethic. And I'm wondering if you feel like a land ethic and a social justice ethic in your own life, or in general, can they be two distinct things, or, or are they, do we inherently have to incorporate social justice work into conservation work and in our, in our land ethics.

DREW: I no longer separate the two. People frequently pigeonhole our issues into urban issues, and urban is frequently code word for people of color. Or rather when people say inner city, certainly, but I, you know, as a rural southern Black man, I cannot separate growing up on land, and having the freedom and the choice. And, and, and, and really the privilege of having land provide sustenance for family is, is, is something that, that impacts my, my sort of the, this, this oneness of social justice and environmental justice. You know, breathing, breathing is not a privilege, right. You know, as, as George Floyd and so many others have pleaded for, for breath, there, there are others pleading more slowly for breath that are being choked out by pollution and by the impacts of climate change, and in commute that impacts communities of color and poor communities in ways that it does not impact majority communities and well-to-do. I can't separate the air, the water, the soil, the earth from, from, from my inalienable rights to life, liberty, and some pursuit of happiness. I can't separate them. And I think when we do separate them, when we do parse them apart, then, that's a divide and conquer strategy. Because no matter how different we may be on the outside physiologically, we need the same things. We require that clean water, potable water. You know, we shouldn't have days where we can't go outside because the air is so bad, and that if you're a child of color, then it's impacting you more than it's impacting a white child. So, you know, that ethic, you know, as Leopold says to preserve the, the, the stability and the, and the beauty of things long term, to keep it, to keep every cog and wheel, to keep all those parts as an intelligent tinkerer, well, to keep all the parts means to consider all the parts and all the parts include all the people. So I'll never separate them, birds and han beings, and every other beast there is, we're all in this together.

AMY: It's been a real honor and a pleasure to talk with you today. Thank you for taking the time.

DREW: Thank you very much, Amy. I appreciate being on Threshold and I'm looking, I'm looking forward to, to crossing more of them and hopefully we get to talk again. Thank you.

MUSIC

AMY: This past May, Drew Lanham wrote an update to his “Nine Rules for the Black Birdwatcher.” It’s called “Nine New Revelations for the Black American Bird-Watcher,” and it was published in Vanity Fair. There’s a link to both pieces on our website.

Threshold Conversations is funded by the Park Foundation, Montana Public Radio, the High Stakes Foundation, and the International Women’s Media Foundation’s Howard G. Buffett Fund for Women Journalists. We’re also powered by listener donations—you can make your contribution at threshold podcast dot org slash donate.

The team behind Threshold Conversations includes Nick Mott, Eva Kalea, Caysi Simpson and Angela Swatek, with help from Caroline Kurtz, Dan Carreno, Hana Carey, Kara Cromwell, Katie DeFusco and Matt Herlihy. Special thanks to Shamim Graff. Our music is by Travis Yost.