Birder to Birder: Imagining the Correspondence of Henry David Thoreau and John James Audubon

Emergence Magazine is an online publication with annual print edition exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality. As we experience the desecration of our lands and waters, the extinguishing of species, and a loss of sacred connection to the Earth, we look to emerging stories. Our podcast features exclusive interviews, narrated essays, stories and more.

In this narration of his essay, birder and naturalist J. Drew Lanham imagines an exchange of letters between Henry David Thoreau and John James Audubon, two pillars of conservation: one who extended his love of nature to care for a fellow human, and one who did not. Through this discourse, Drew asks: in the ongoing response to racism, how might reckoning with history help us to widen our field of view and weave better futures?

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J. Drew Lanham is a birder, naturalist, and hunter-conservationist. He 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. His essays and poetry can be found in Orion, Audubon, Flycatcher, and Wilderness, and in the anthologies The Colors of Nature, State of the Heart, Bartram’s Living Legacy, and Carolina Writers at Home. He is an Alumni Distinguished Professor of Wildlife Ecology and Master Teacher at Clemson University.

Onyis Martin is a Kenyan artist living in Nairobi who experiments with a wide range of materials, exploring the human condition and the global geopolitical interface, specifically through issues surrounding human trafficking, migration, corruption and displacement. His work has been shown internationally, most recently in Cape Town for a solo exhibition, Before Tomorrow Comes.