

Huck Distinguished Lecture in the Life Sciences: J. Drew Lanham – “Coloring the Conservation Conversation”
March 18 @ 12:00 pm - 1:00 pm EDT
Join the Huck Institutes of the Life Sciences for its distinguished lecture series featuring J. Drew Lanham from Clemson University. In this lecture, Lanham will discuss what it means to embrace the full breadth of his African-American heritage and his deep kinship to nature and adoration of birds. The convergence of ornithologist, college professor, poet, author and conservation activist blend to bring our awareness of the natural world and our moral responsibility for it forward in new ways. Candid by nature — and because of it — Lanham will examine how conservation must be a rigorous science and evocative art, inviting diversity and race to play active roles in celebrating our natural world.
About the Speaker:
A native of Edgefield, South Carolina, J. Drew Lanham is the author of The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature, which received the Reed Award from the Southern Environmental Law Center and the Southern Book Prize, and was a finalist for the John Burroughs Medal. Most recently, he is the author of Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beasts. He is a birder, naturalist, hunter-conservationist, and a 2022 MacArthur Fellow. An Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University, he and his family live in the Upstate of South Carolina, a soaring hawk’s downhill glide from the southern Appalachian escarpment that the Cherokee once called the Blue Wall.
The talk is open to all and will be on Tuesday, March 18, at noon in 001 Chemical and Biomedical Engineering Building on the University Park campus.
Contact Joshua Barnett (jtb5938@psu.edu) for more information.