Southern Wonder: Scot Duncan on Alabama’s Untold Biodiversity

Written by Hannah Truby

A true steward of Alabama, Duncan is a conservation biologist in a state where it’s especially tricky to be one.

Historically speaking, rural Southern attitudes about the environment have also been complex, marked by a connection to the land and a desire to steward it for future generations, but coupled with a strong sense of economic survival. Politically, this has manifested as skepticism of pro-environmental policies and education, and conservation practices are often met with tension.

“Our state has a lot of outdoor culture - a lot of hunters and fishers - and they do have a deep respect for nature,” Duncan agrees. “But that doesn’t mean they always understand how it works. My job is to teach them how it all fits together.”

In 2013, Duncan wrote “Southern Wonder: Alabama’s Surprising Biodiversity” with the aim of educating college students about conservation. He sought to emphasize the importance of the state’s biodiversity to its residents, and the fact that humans inevitably depend on biodiversity for survival.

“Biodiversity is good for people. It helps people live healthier, happier, more fulfilling lives,” he says. “I wanted to put in front of people the future that we need, and it becomes less burdensome and instead one we can work toward and we all want to be part of when you look at it that way.”

“Scot really made the academic case and wove together the answer to [questions like], Why are we so biodiverse? Where’s it coming from? What are all the factors that have come together?” Beth Stewart, the executive director of the Cahaba River Society, says. “He got his arms around something very big to help us understand why Alabama is so special.”

“My students are always amazed to see Alabama at the top, rather than the bottom, of a list for once.” Duncan is a professor at Birmingham-Southern College, a role he sees as an opportunity to further emphasize the importance of conservation. “I learned early on in teaching that I can’t hit people with doom and gloom because they just check out.”

The doom and gloom to which Duncan is referring is pollution. Its erosion. Shifting rainfall patterns, and rising temperatures—effects of climate change that are threatening the state’s species and ecosystems. 

“It’s the collision of the extinction crisis and the climate crisis right here at ground zero in the Southeast,” Duncan says. “And if you look, we have more extinct species from Alabama than any other state on the continent, following Hawai’i.”

Over the years, Duncan’s research has taken him around the world; he’s studied the regrowth of tropical forests in Uganda and worked with sea turtles in Panama, conducted research in mangrove swamps in Costa Rica, and spent three months in Antarctica working with snow biologists tagging seals. But of all the exotic locales, the state of Alabama remains his favorite.

When Duncan and his wife relocated to Alabama for his teaching role at the college, their expectations – which weren’t high, he admits – were surpassed and then some.

“I wound up finding that there was a lifetime of work for people with my kind of background to do here to protect species from extinction, and I wasn’t just pleasantly surprised—I was blown away by what’s here. And it needs protecting.”

Duncan's nearly lifelong pursuit of advocating for the natural world began with his love for birding - and began well before he was born.

After the Civil War, an earlier generation of the Duncans moved from Kentucky to Florida and settled on a piece of land that jutted into Pensacola Bay. The peninsula, they soon learned, served as a kind of pit stop for millions of birds migrating between North America and the tropics each spring and fall.

“My parents still live on that land today,” Duncan says. “They started noticing all these colorful birds in the yard, and that ultimately led them to become bird watchers. When my little brother and I weren’t learning about birds, we were learning about wildflowers, reptiles, trees—whatever else was around.”

For Duncan, the natural world wasn’t something to study in books—it was something to  experience. He was raised by parents who spent their weekends outdoors in the surrounding marshlands, often with other birders and people who were “into nature.”

“I grew up sitting around the table while all the big adults were either talking about birds or conservation problems like developing the Gulf Islands, pollution, supporting the National Park Service,” he recounts. “I picked up birding myself when I was 8, and I never stopped.”

Since 2022, Duncan has served as the executive director of Alabama Audubon, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting “conservation and a greater knowledge of birds, their habitats, and the natural world since our inception in 1927.

“So, however many years later, birding is still my favorite pastime,” Duncan says. “And birds are great ambassadors for getting people interested in nature.”

“That’s when I’ll bring up ecosystem services, services that humans depend on almost a daily basis,” he tells me. “They are things nature provides for us for free. For example, for a lot of us in our region, much of our drinking water is taken from the river. If the watershed for that river is not well managed – there's lots of pollution, there's lots of deforestation – that river water is going to be full of mud, full of toxins. It costs us lots of money to clean that water so that it's drinkable, and we can’t always get all of it out. But a forest cleans that water and protects our watersheds for free.”

Duncan details this in his latest book, “Southern Rivers: Restoring America’s Freshwater Biodiversity”, as well as the two years he spent seeking solutions to the crisis in the Southeast region. He aimed to answer how it could safeguard its rich aquatic life while still getting people the water they need, and championed a range of solutions, such as low-impact development, the greening of urban spaces, and offering a multi-faceted approach to preserving our vital waterways.

“We just have to give nature the space, the tools, to provide those services,” he says.

As part of his mission to promote the conservation of the state, Duncan and his team at The Alabama Audubon have focused more of their efforts on attracting tourists to this region; named the Black Belt for its distinctive black prairie soils and rare species of grassland birds, it also boasts a number of rivers, beaches, canyons, and falls - and he wants people to see the natural beauty for themselves.

“One of my missions is to tell people all these biodiversity stats and why we have them,” he says. “All these amazing things are relatively underappreciated in terms of a tourist destination, and we’re working to get more tourists here to see it for themselves.”

It was during the COVID years that Alabama made the jump from number five to number four in biodiversity. Duncan redid that same analysis, and is confident in his prediction that it will be in third by the end of the decade.

One might guess that a 50-something biologist might be rather cynical about the state of things, but not Duncan.

“About ten years into being a professor, I started to notice that my students knew more about the environment than I did when I was in college. That says a lot, given my background. Part of this is because environmental education has become a priority. They’re learning about these topics in school, but also through the internet. People get curious, watch YouTube, and find learning to be more enjoyable than it used to be. Yes, there are downsides, but I’m staying positive. These are the ingredients shaping a good future."

Duncan’s decades-long work can be encapsulated to one mission statement: to help people see Alabama in a new light, and with it, a hopeful vision for the future.