#gives you a deeper understanding of the systems that must be dismantled and how exactly to dismantle them as well

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The Home Place, subtitled “Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature,” takes an unique look at the experiences of working in environmental science, birding, farming, and otherwise existing in eco-spaces as a person of color. This book was my sister’s selection for our family’s ongoing Anti-Racism Book Club. As a graduate student in earth and environmental science, she thinks and talks a lot about race and gender within her field, mentors younger female students in the field, and teaches undergraduates. Like her, I expected this book to lean into the challenges of representation in the field and to comment on the (under-discussed) positive relationship between people of color and the natural world. And while these broader topics were discussed, this was, first and foremost, a deeply personal memoir. J. Drew Lanham starts his story where his life started, explaining his personal and familial connection with the land—The Home Place, a specific farmstead in Edgefield County, South Carolina, where he was born and grew up. This personal connection and narrative is essential—Lanham’s love for nature is shaped in his formative years by the close connection his family has with the land they live on and farm. His later academic connections to the land—from his graduate research to his volunteer work collecting bird identification data to his writing and communication about scientific topics—all these stem from that childhood passion that runs deeper than interest or fascination: J. Drew Lanham understands the land on an instinctual level. He sees himself as a natural being, in tune with the deer, wild turkeys, and monarch butterflies, with the possums, foxes, and eastern red cedars.

The structure of the book (moving roughly chronologically through Lanham’s birth, upbringing, growth, and independent life) is shaped by its foundational idea: Lanham’s conviction that he is a product of the land that raised him, as are his family members, his siblings, his parents, his grand-parents, and his ancestors before them. Therefore, looking at and observing The Home Place naturally leads to the work of observing his own family and how he came to be who he is in the world. The Home Place is exactly this, both physical landscape and the people that exist in harmony with it. Over and over again, in both small and large ways, Lanham reinforces this central thesis—from the chapter on the spring that fed and sustained the Home Place, which was maintained by his father and could not continue after Daddy’s death, to the chapter on digging into his family’s history (figuratively and literary) as he traces the Lanhams’ connections to the land. J. Drew Lanham acknowledges that this central thesis is not necessarily obvious nor free from controversy. Many Black Americans’ experiences with the land exist within the legacy of slavery and stories of immense suffering on land that never belonged to them. But, for Lanham and for other Black Americans who grew up close to the land, surviving off it and also existing with it could develop a new narrative around Black identity and the natural landscape.

When I think of subsistence farming, I often think of the many challenges and set backs of the hardscrabble life. And while Lanham is not shy about sharing that his parents occasionally “argued about whether to buy hay for cows or groceries for us,” his book as a whole focuses on the feeling of abundance and of spiritual wealth he experienced growing up living off the land. He emphasizes that land itself is a source of wealth, in all its forms, and that fostering a close relationship with the land is a way forward that he perceives for Black Americans. He says “But the land, in spite of its history, still holds hope for making good on the promise we thought it could, especially if we reconnect to it. The reparations lie not in what someone will give us, but in what we already own. The landscape can grow crops for us as well as it does for others.” I thought this was a very interesting perspective that strives to redefine the Black/natural world narrative. This was one of several moments in the book where I really felt that Lanham was writing for a Black audience specifically. He does have a perspective that puts the impetus on each person to choose their relationship with the land, to be a responsible steward of the natural world, to educate themselves, to lean into their connections with the land and trust it.

I was somewhat startled by this as it felt that Lanham prioritized talking about what Black people can do to achieve the “Normal Rockwell painting life” his family led when a huge part of systemic poverty and racism (from my perspective) could not be Black people themselves. Many systems—education and pay rates, land ownership and inheritance, access to banking loans and credit—are broken and rely on all of us to engage with fixing them. No matter how strong you are, you cannot climb alone from beneath a bolder that is pining you down, a boulder you inherit, a boulder you have to carry every single day and in every situation simply because of the color of your skin in America. Perhaps Lanham intends, intentionally, to focus on what Black people can do, in spite of these broken systems, as acts of empowerment and self-determinism? I was surprised how individualistic this book felt at times, with very little focus on how systems of oppression could be dismantled. For example, his primary suggestion for how birding while black can become safer is to normalize this experience by invading the natural sciences with more and more people of color. “Get more people of color ‘out there,’” he writes. In sharing this recommendation for progress, he doesn’t acknowledge very directly how dangerous this act is or how difficult his recommendations are to follow for each person who must be a pioneer in the field. Of course he understands the risks and challenges, as he’s been the “odd bird” so many times in his own life, but perhaps he could have spoken as well to the ways others in leadership positions (regardless of race) could provide support for young people entering the natural sciences (from mentorships and training, to financial scholarships, to diversity workshops and conversations that increase awareness and inclusivity within the field). Saying this, I feel strange criticizing his way of talking about these topics, even if the criticism is simply asking for more (more beyond an individual’s responsibilities, more beyond Black people making changes by stepping in and fighting for their spaces), as Lanham’s approach leans on his lived experiences as a Black man, which I cannot relate to in several ways.

I can, however, relate to his experiences growing up with a close relationship to the land. Unlike my sister, my experiences rambling through the Maine woods, raising sheep and chickens, and hiking, swimming, and spending nearly every moment of my youthful summers out of doors, did not translate into a career in environmental science. However this doesn’t mean that I don’t think of my relationship with nature as close nor my personal and emotional experiences with nature as deeply spiritual and transformative. As a writer, as a teacher, I draw all the time on my understanding of nature and my love for it in order to connect with other human beings, to bring the beauty of ecosystems to life for them, to find common ground (an apt metaphor). I noted the sections of The Home Place where Lanham talked about his graduate research and discussed how sometimes the monotony of the work cut into his love for the natural and his appreciation of all the experiences that brought him here. This was a very relatable moment—for anyone who chooses a career based on passion, that passion needs to withstand the least glamorous moments of that job. At its most slow, most boring, and most frustrating, do you still love this thing? Do you still see its worth even when you hate it? For me, the natural world can be relegated to a place of spiritual purity, simply experienced and enjoyed, because I don’t study it. Yet, Lanham reconciles scientific study and simple appreciation nicely, describing how his passion grows with his concrete and scientific understanding, and how the spiritual and scientific dimensions of his experiences with nature both shape his love and commitment.

I loved that Lanham described how his foray into writing brought a new third dimension to his personal relationship with nature—looking back in order to capture in words, he was able to trace the significance of The Home Place—and the act of literary examination changed him: he cried tears of release as he shared his story with his writing workshop, the first time he truly mourned the loss of his father after thirty years. In one of my favorite lines in the book, Lanham says of his experience first sharing his work with his peers in a writing workshop: “They’d unwittingly given me permission to be someone I’d never been.” For him, this was someone emotional, someone who sheds tears in moments of deeply-felt sorrow and transcendent joy. That joy, often, comes when facing the natural world as it is, and so he applies his pen to responding to nature. His descriptions of the natural world are interwoven beautifully throughout the book and are, so clearly, the creations of a close observer. I related so deeply to these moments, and felt transported, as I read: “Now, as back then, fall is the time when nature speaks most clearly to me…Breathing is suddenly easier and the soaking sweat evaporates. You want to inhale deeply enough to take in every molecule wafting on the wind. The tired smallness of September’s deep green fades then flames into October’s vermilion sumacs and scarlet maples, lemon-yellow poplars and golden hickories.” This is both accessible and accurate writing. J. Drew Lanham knows his science, but he describes the world visually, as he perceives it, not as he measures it.

For me, these writing moments were more effective than the structure of the chapters, which started to feel a bit formulaic as the book progressed. Lanham frequently uses the natural world as metaphors and many of these metaphor are born of quite astute and surprising observations—the ecology of a church’s location growing the mindset of the congregation and the Tuskegee Airmen as a metaphor for flight that takes Black people beyond the contexts others expect for them (the Wild West is another space examined along similar lines of thinking). But Lanham tends to set his big metaphors up in the same way: beginning a chapter with the central concept (in its most analytical, literal, or universal iteration), following this up with personal anecdotes, and ending the chapter (like its own short, contained essay) with deeper reflection on how this metaphor operates. This chapter structure, although predictable, didn’t lose the joy of any one of these observations. Lanham writes some truly profound individual sentences. And believe him. His depth is genuine.

I would be remiss in writing about my response to this book if I didn’t briefly address the chapter “Jawbone,” which troubled me deeply. For all of Lanham’s gentleness and nuanced appreciation of each living thing, he is still a hunter, and he describes a particular hunt—and the deer’s jawbone that he saves from this hunt—in this chapter. His interest in hunting is tied to a larger interest in land conservation and ecosystem management, as he explains it, and it seems that he tries to contrast his approach to hunting with those who hunt for trophies, or for the wrong reasons. But, the outcome is still the same. And he uses many of the tools—scents, blinds, and mating calls—that other hunters use to outwit their prey. He also tries to contrast his hunting with that of others’ by focusing on the deer’s jawbone he has collected. Rather than the trophy of a large set of antlers, he prizes the jawbone with evidence of the animal’s long lifespan and role in the ecosystem. The way he feels about this jawbone, however (elated, awed that this animal died at his hand and not someone else’s), seems to me not very different than the way trophy hunters feel about their prizes. Sure, he consumes the meat from the deer he kills, but it seems that hunting is not necessarily for his and his family’s survival, nor significant as an affordable food source available to them. I think I was most troubled by the concept of control and how that comes through in this chapter. It seems like hunting, for Lanham, seems to be rewarding in a kind of patriarchal, stewardship way in which the reward—while paired with thoughtful choices about which animals to kill and how to use the meat—is not sorrowful necessity, but some kind of pride (in the hunt, in the win, in the triumph). This chapter was all the more jarring following up on the youthful chapter where Lanham kills a sparrow with a bb gun and truly mourns the preciousness of a life lost. And while I also frown upon willful ignorance or dismissal of the source of one’s meat (or willful ignorance about the human and environmental impact from one’s vegetarian diet, as well!) I do think that the act of killing changes you as a person. Although I do not agree with Lanham on the topic of hunting, this is one section of the book, and human are complex, living contradictions. No one needs to hold perspectives and behave in ways that are perfectly consistent; no one ever does.

This book was a powerful testimony to how much we can—and, Lanham argues, we should—rely on nature. This book contains the particularity of the Black experience and seems to speak directly to a Black audience, as mentioned. But it also contains much that is universally applicable to our lives in the 21st Century, as we humans grow increasingly removed from nature and from the lifecycles of ecosystems and understanding how we are, inescapably, part of those. I love how Lanham observes at the very beginning of the book that, “to be wild is to be colorful, and in the claims of colorfulness there’s an embracing and a self-acceptance.” Through this book, he celebrates his specific identity and his experience as a person of color, but he also taps into our shared humanity when he illuminates the rewards of living a wild life. He thoughtfully reveals himself through describing his ecosystem, and, in this, invites us to see ourselves in the same way, with our own ecosystems, Home Places, and reasons to live a natural life.