J. Drew Lanham > Quotes

“I believe the best way to begin reconnecting humanity's heart, mind, and soul to nature is for us to share our individual stories.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“I don't expect everyone to feel the same way that I do about land. For so many of us, the scars are still too fresh. Fields of cotton stretching to the horizon - land worked, sweated, and suffered over for the profit of others - probably don't engender warm feelings among most black people. But the land, in spite of its history, still holds hope for making good on the promises we thought it could, especially if we can reconnect to it. The reparations lie not in what someone will give us, but in what we already own. The land can grow crops for us as well as it does for others. It can yield loblolly pine and white oak for us as it has for others. And it can nurture wildlife and the spirit for us, just like it has for others.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“I am a man in love with nature. I am an eco-addict, consuming everything that the outdoors offers its all-you-can-sense, seasonal buffet. I am a wildling, born of forests and fields and more comfortable on unpaved back roads and winding woodland paths than in any place where concrete, asphalt, and crowds prevail.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“The wild things and places belong to all of us. So while I can't fix the bigger problems of race in the United States - can't suggest a means by which I, and others like me, will always feel safe - I can prescribe a solution in my own small corner. Get more people of color "out there." Turn oddities into commonplace. The presence of more black birders, wildlife biologists, hunters, hikers, and fisher-folk will say to others that we, too, appreciate the warble of a summer tanager, the incredible instincts of a whitetail buck, and the sound of wind in the tall pines. Our responsibility is to pass something on to those coming after. As young people of color reconnect with what so many of their ancestors knew - that our connections to the land run deep, like the taproots of mighty oaks; that the land renews and sustains us - maybe things will begin to change.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“To save wildlife and wild places the traction has to come not from the regurgitation of bad-news data but from the poets, prophets, preachers, professors, and presidents who have always dared to inspire.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“In driving creatures to extinction and decimating habitats without so much as a backward glance or lingering regret, human hands create disharmony. That, to me, is evil.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“The hardest ground to plow was living fully without worry, not in the past gone on or future yet to come—but in the present hardpan now.”
― J. Drew Lanham, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts

“And so I think about land. But more and more I also think about how other black and brown folks think about land. I wonder how our lives would change for the better if the ties to place weren't broken by bad memories, misinformation, and ignorance. I think about schoolchildren playing in safe, clean, green spaces, where the water and air flow clear and the birdsong sounds sweet. More and more I think of land not just in remote, desolate wilderness but in inner-city parks and suburban backyards and community gardens.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“But on far too many Sundays I was pulled from the roaming rhythm and natural worship that truly fulfilled me. A church Sunday meant that God was suddenly confined to something that seemed much less miraculous than the woods and fields where creation was so evident.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“There are preconceived notions - of where I should go, of what I should do, and even of who I should do it with - of who I am supposed to be as a black man. But my choice of career and my passion for wildness means that I will forever be the odd bird, the raven in a horde of white doves, the blackbird in a flock of snow buntings.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“I eventually realized that to make a difference I had to step outside, into creation, and refocus on the roots of my passion. If an ounce of soil, a sparrow, or an acre of forest is to remain then we must all push things forward. To save wildlife and wild places the traction has to come not from the regurgitation of bad-news data but from the poets, prophets, preachers, professors, and presidents who have always dared to inspire. Heart and mind cannot be exclusive of one another in the fight to save anything. To help others understand nature is to make it breathe like some giant: a revolving, evolving, celestial being with ecosystems acting as organs and the living things within those places -- humans included -- as cells vital to its survival.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“Night is never as dark as when one refuses to shine a lantern to see.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“To help others understand nature is to make it breathe like some giant: a revolving, evolving, celestial being with ecosystems acting as organs and the living things within those places—humans included—as cells vital to its survival.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“A heaping of hypocrisy is often served alongside the southern hospitality. Double standards are as common as ragweed and persistent as kudzu across the region.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“There really aren’t hard-and-fast answers to most questions, though. Wildness means living in the unknown.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“Being a birder in the United States means that you're probably a middle-aged, middle-class, well-educated white man. While most of the labels apply to me, I am a black man and there fore a birding anomaly. The chances of seeing someone who looks like me while on the trail are only slightly greater than those of sighting an ivory-billed woodpecker. In my lifetime I've encountered fewer than ten black birders. We're true rarities in our own right.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“Get more people of color "out there." Turn oddities into commonplace. The presence of more black birders, wildlife biologists, hunters, hikers and fisher-folk will say to others that we, too, appreciate the warble of a summer tanager, the incredible instincts of a whitetail buck, and the sound of wind in the tall pines.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“It was a different world, one I sometimes wish I could revisit.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“sometimes the words that make the fragmented more whole need to come from someone in a different skin.”
― J. Drew Lanham, The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature

“It’s not so much about identifying what birds are, as feeling who birds are. Head nods, jaw drops, smiles, tears and abject adoration, are all “feel marks” for identifying the wood thrush—a brown-backed, forest-singing soul seldom seen, but more often heard and felt deeply. As this bird pumped its heart out in auto three-part harmony, the one inside my own chest stopped beating for a while.”
― J. Drew Lanham, Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts