An on line discussion of books that have been or are currently being read by members of the Audubon Naturalist Society Conservation Philosophy Reading Group. We choose books, old and new, that collectively constitute the intellectual underpinnings of conservation philosophy.
March 29, 2021 The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man's Love Affair with Nature by J. Drew Lanham, winner of the E. O. Wilson Biodiversity Award. He will join us by zoom!
We were so blessed to have J. Drew Lanham present for the Zoom discussion of his book. It was a splendid session. Toward the end, I asked him if he was influenced by Thoreau, whose biography we recently discussed. Drew had a lot to say but what I took away was his concluding statement that “Thoreau was woke!” How providential that a black ornithologist should be the the one to awaken me to the moral bennefits of combining the environmental/conservation movement, historically dominated by white folks, with the social justice movement pioneered by people of color like, to name but a few, Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and now J. Drew Lanham. The current momentum generated by the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the lingering legacy of white supremacy, if combined with that of environmentalists who are equally fed up with the sinful degradation of our living planet by unregulated capitalism, has the potential to make a lot of good things happen. How apropos that our discussion was followed by a flurry of emails advocating that our next book be on the topic of environmental justice. I wish that exchange would take place outside of our silo, e.g., on this blog site, so that others around the world could benefit from our insights.
Review
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We were so blessed to have J. Drew Lanham present for the Zoom discussion of his book. It was a splendid session. Toward the end, I asked him if he was influenced by Thoreau, whose biography we recently discussed. Drew had a lot to say but what I took away was his concluding statement that “Thoreau was woke!” How providential that a black ornithologist should be the the one to awaken me to the moral bennefits of combining the environmental/conservation movement, historically dominated by white folks, with the social justice movement pioneered by people of color like, to name but a few, Harriet Tubman, Fredrick Douglass, Martin Luther King, Lin-Manuel Miranda, and now J. Drew Lanham. The current momentum generated by the Black Lives Matter movement in response to the lingering legacy of white supremacy, if combined with that of environmentalists who are equally fed up with the sinful degradation of our living planet by unregulated capitalism, has the potential to make a lot of good things happen. How apropos that our discussion was followed by a flurry of emails advocating that our next book be on the topic of environmental justice. I wish that exchange would take place outside of our silo, e.g., on this blog site, so that others around the world could benefit from our insights.
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