Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast. I'm Emanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence

Magazine, located on the unseated ancestral lands of the Coast Mewalk people of present-day

Marin County. Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting

ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Jay 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.

In this essay, Drew imagines an exchange of letters

between two pillars of conservation,

one who extended his love of nature to care for his fellow man, and one who did

none. Through this discourse, Drew asks, in the ongoing struggle against racism, how might reckoning

with history help us to widen our field of view and weave better futures.

We live in an age where identity, by whatever key, places us in pigeonholes.

By race, ethnicity, gender, non-gender, geography, political affiliation, occupation, and even vaccination status,

we nest in certain identities where we are accepted by some and rejected by others.

There are nests we choose, but also those that are chosen for us.

Although most term the current epoch, the Anthropocene, the age of humans,

I eschew this label in favor of my own tag, the identocene, the age of whoness.

It is in our identities, chosen and or cast upon us, that we often worry over how to understand past sins, resolve present

predicaments, and re-weave who we've been, and what we've done into better futures.

Identifying things is what I do for a living. An ornithologist and bird watcher for most of my

life, I've spent more than 50 years obsessed with identifying winged, feathered beings. It's become

almost a reflex to call out a bird's name as I would that of a good

...