Now in the interest of full disclosure, I should say that… technically and professionally… Drew is a professor of wildlife ecology at Clemson University. However, I have read Drew Lanham’s memoir, The Home Place, and I know, as a result, that his writing—even his thinking—is threaded with poetry.
Consider these lines from The Home Place: “There is the brown of spring floods rushing over a Savannah river shoal. There is the gold of ripening tobacco drying in the heat of summer’s last breath. There are endless rows of cotton’s cloudy white. My plumage is a kaleidoscopic rainbow of an eternal hope and the deepest despair and darkness. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored. . . . I am the rare bird, the oddity: appreciated by some for my different perspective and discounted by others as an unnecessary nuisance, an unusually colored fish out of water.”
One chapter, “Birding While Black,” begins with this _paragraph_: “It’s only 9:06 AM but I think I might get hanged today.”
Another, “Jawbone” starts ”Killing is a dying art. In a shrink-wrapped prepackaged world, most people don’t consider or want to know where their meat comes from.”
These are the timings of a poet, and the descriptions of a poet.
While the Humanities Hub is happy to host poets and other kinds of writers, with Drew we have someone whose poetry raises important questions about the humanities, Including, through attention to birds, how we think about animals, and, because we are animals, how we think about ourselves as humans, as human animals. That is, because we are animals, and have long known that we are animals–after all, it’s been more than two millennia since Aristotle said “man is a rational animal”–what we think about animals means what we think about ourselves.
Moreover, how we treat animals, and the environments that host animals, show us how we are treating ourselves. In this, then, Drew’s interest in the history of the landscape and the lives that both made the landscape possible and are possible only in certain landscapes matches nicely with the humanities interest in preservation, in historical awareness, and in hoping that neither birds nor human suffer the devastations associated with monocultures. Or conversely, we can hope that we might all share in the benefits of ecological diversity, be it biological diversity or cultural diversity, if we can make such a distinction among what are after all just varieties of animals’ lives. Wildlife ecology, that is, meets cultural ecology.
Drew Lanham will be speaking at 5PM on February 14 in Academic Success Center, 118, as part of Black History Month, and on the topic of “Reclaiming our Ecology: A Personal Picture of a Land Ethic.” Those last two words, a poetic phrase in themselves, also come from his memoir, The Home Place.