ONLINE: Conversations on Race and Environment: Coloring the Conservation Conversation

press release: At this virtual edition of Everyone’s Earth, J. Drew Lanham will discuss what it means to embrace the full breadth of his African American heritage and his deep kinship to nature and adoration of birds. As an ornithologist, college professor, poet, author, and conservation activist, Lanham will offer unique perspectives that expand our awareness of the natural world and progress our moral responsibility forward in new ways. By examining how conservation is both a rigorous science and evocative art, Lanham invites diversity and race to play active roles in celebrating our natural world. Free and open to the public.

A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. Drew Lanham is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal. He is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist who has published essays and poetry in publications including Orion, Audubon, Flycatcher, and Wilderness, and in several anthologies, including The Colors of Nature, State of the Heart, Bartram’s Living Legacy, and Carolina Writers at Home. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in the Upstate of South Carolina, a soaring hawk’s downhill glide from the southern Appalachian escarpment that the Cherokee once called the Blue Wall.