Lawrence Lenhart

Weasel Clones and Vaccine Drones: Reintroducing the Black-Footed Ferret to the Aubrey Valley

In this multimedia presentation, Lawrence Lenhart explores what it means to imagine family, home, and hope in an era of ecological collapse. Drawing from two interconnected works—the nonfiction book Backvalley Ferrets and its rock opera adaptation Pop Goes the Ferret!—the talk follows one family debating whether to have children amid accelerating climate change, economic precarity, and social transformation. Their personal story runs parallel to the reemergence of the black-footed ferret, aka BFFs (“North America’s most endangered mammal”), whose extinction and revival through drones, clones, and captive breeding illuminate both the promises and perils of human intervention in nature. Through lecture, reading, song, and documentary images from northern Arizona’s Aubrey Valley, Lenhart explores questions about family planning, feminist and ecological futures, highway infrastructures, real estate development, desertification, and the crisis of masculinity—issues that collectively define the new American experience. Blending storytelling, environmental humanities, and cultural critique, Lenhart offers a tragicomic meditation on what it takes to make (and keep) a BFF in the Anthropocene.