Deconstructing the idea of “wild”
“Home isn’t just where you’re from – it’s where your heart settles into the land and says,
‘I see you. I know you. I’m part of you.’”
— Dr. J. Drew Lanham
What does it mean to belong to a place, and who gets to decide what counts as “wild”?
Today, we’re in conversation with Dr. J. Drew Lanham: ornithologist, ecologist, naturalist, poet, professor, mentor, author, and all-around Southern sage.
We explore what happens when Black and Brown communities reclaim their relationship with land and nature, how culture shapes our ideas of wilderness, and why joy, memory, and resistance all belong in the outdoors.
Drew brings lyricism, truth-telling, and deep curiosity to this conversation, from front porches to forest edges.
🎧 Listen now on all podcast platforms or at thewildidea.com
Books, resources, and other notes from today’s episode:
- The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature by J Drew Lanham
- Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts by J. Drew Lanham
- Writing the Wild
- Force of Nature: How Dr. Drew Lanham Is Changing Birding by Nic Brown, Garden & Gun
- The MacArthur Foundation – Joseph Drew Lanham
- Drew on PBS NewsHour
Connect with Today's Guest
J. Drew Lanham is an academic, writer, artist and public intellectual, from Edgefield and Aiken, South Carolina. He is an Alumni Distinguished Professor, Provost’s Professor and Master Teacher of Wildlife Ecology at Clemson University, where his most recent scholarly efforts address the confluences of race, place and nature. A conservation and cultural ornithologist, he has mentored nearly fifty graduate students, published extensively in the scientific literature and taught courses in conservation biology, forest ecology, wildlife policy, ornithology and environmental literature/nature writing.
Dr. Lanham is a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. He was also named one of the 100 most influential Black Americans by “The Root”, in 2022.
His forthcoming works are Joy is the Justice We Give Ourselves (poetry-Hub City Press), The Bird I Became (children’s book -Enchanted Lion), and Range Maps – Birds, Blackness and Loving Nature Between the Two (eco-memoir -Farrar, Straus and Giroux).
Drew is intensely southern and rural, despising the regressive politics of the entrenched and racist “old South”, but deeply loves the region’s ecology and is hopeful that a better South will equate to a better world.
Connect with Drew on Instagram.
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