Dorceta Taylor

Dorceta E. Taylor is an environmental sociologist known for her work on both environmental justice and racism in the environmental movement. She is the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Michigan’s School of Environment and Sustainability (SEAS), where she also serves as the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor of Environmental Justice. Taylor's research has ranged over environmental history, environmental justice, environmental policy, leisure and recreation, gender and development, urban affairs, race relations, collective action and social movements, green jobs, diversity in the environmental field, food insecurity, and urban agriculture.

The New Horizons in Conservation Conference is now an annual gathering for people who are from underrepresented backgrounds in the conservation field and those who are committed to the principals diversity, equity, and inclusion. The event draws attendees from across the nation, in varying professions and career stages, including but not limited to undergraduate and graduate students, academics, environmental professionals, policy advocates, and elected officials. New Horizons also works to bolster the critical pipelines built by diversity pathway programs across the nation by providing spaces for participants to connect with peers, network, engage in hands-on professional development workshops and training, attend local field trips, and hear from a diverse range of leaders and visionaries in the field. The second annual New Horizons in Conservation Conference to took place in Chicago, Illinois in April 2019 and the third annual conference is planned to take place in Ann Arbor, Michigan, in April 2020.

In 2018, she was celebrated by a wide range of the world's most prominent environmental organizations. She was awarded the Women in Conservation Rachel Carson Award from the National Audubon Society, the Freudenburg Lifetime Achievement Award from the Association of Environmental Science and Studies, the National Science Foundation's Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics & Engineering, Mentoring (PAESMEM), the University of Michigan Distinguished Faculty Achievement Award, and the President's Award from the Detroit Audubon Society.

In 2018, the New Horizons in Conservation Conference #NewHorizons19 - spearheaded by Taylor - took place in Washington, DC. More than 200 students, faculty, Environmental Program and Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program alumni, and conservation professionals—the majority of them people of color—gathered to "celebrate and assess" diversity, equity, and inclusion in the environmental sector, marking a milestone in conservation history. "The students and young professionals who attended this conference represent the future of conservation," Taylor said of the conference, "They are multicultural, multi-faceted, and talented, and they are poised to take on leadership roles in this sector. Diversity benefits us all, and there is strength in it." Programming included an extensive speaker series, community building, and career and academic development for program alumni.

In 2015, Taylor became the James E. Crowfoot Collegiate Professor of Environmental Justice and the Director of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion at the University of Michigan's School for Environment and Sustainability (SEAS).

In 2015, Taylor launched the Environmental Fellows Program (EFP) in partnership with the Environmental Grantmakers Association. The Environmental Fellows Program (EFP) is a national program that seeks to diversify the environmental and conservation philanthropic field through 12-week paid summer internships for graduate students at partner foundations and nonprofit organizations. Funders of the program include C.S. Mott, Island Foundation, New York Community Trust, Pisces Foundation, and more. The program aims to reduce barriers to entry for mid-level and senior-level jobs in environmental organizations and foundations for professionals from underrepresented backgrounds by connecting them to mentors and giving them experience in the field.

Also in 2015, Taylor began the University of Michigan branch of the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program (DDCSP), funded by the Doris Duke Foundation. This program is a 2-summer internship aimed at diversifying the conservation sector by giving opportunities to students from underrepresented backgrounds in the field and those committed to diversity, equity, and inclusion. Through this experience, approximately 20 undergraduates gain experience each summer through one summer of lab research at the University of Michigan and an additional summer of an internship with environmental groups.

In 2014, she was celebrated by the city of San Francisco as one of 29 black environmentalists who have made “real and lasting change”.

Taylor's second book and third piece of her series, Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York University Press, 2014) chronicles the contamination of minority and low income communities in the U.S. It examines seven different theories that have been used to explain why racial minorities and the poor are often found living adjacent to toxic facilities or undesirable land uses, and particularly challenges the assumption that minority communities have the requisite mobility to move away from such facilities. Grounded in practical examples, the book documents how the history of racially discriminatory housing policies has effectively forced minorities into proximity with polluting industries. The book incorporates insights from sociology and the study of urban development that had previously been ignored in environmental justice scholarship. One scholar suggested that, in view of Taylor's comprehensive treatment of the early history of the American environmental justice movement, her book should be "the last" to review that history in such detail, as future writers could simply refer parenthetically to her work.

In 2012 Taylor became the principal investigator of a five-year United States Department of Agriculture grant to study racial and class disparities in food access in the state of Michigan.

In a project running from 2012 to 2018, Taylor collaborated with researchers from Grand Valley State University, Michigan State University, University of Michigan-Flint, Lake Superior State University, and the University of Wisconsin-Madison to work on a project that examines food insecurity in Michigan. A website known as Food Access in Michigan or FAIM, launched in August 2018. The study examines the relationship between demographic characteristics and the distribution of food outlets in 18 small and medium-sized cities in the state. It also examines effective nutrition and behavioral interventions, and mechanisms for enhancing access to food and participation in local food initiatives. These issues are being studied in Sault Ste. Marie, Brimley/ Bay Mills, and St. Ignace - towns in the Upper Peninsula; Holland, Muskegon, Benton Harbor, and Grand Rapids in the west; Flint, Saginaw, Lansing, and Kalamazoo in the central part; and Ypsilanti, Taylor, Southfield, Warren, Pontiac, Inkster, and Dearborn in the southeast. These cities have large populations of one or more of the following racial and ethnic groups: Blacks, Hispanics, Native Americans, Asians, and Arabs.

In 2010, she won the Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award for the book, Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change (Duke University Press, 2009). Taylor was the chair of the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association from 2012-2013.

A scholar of environmental justice, Taylor's work has garnered numerous awards. Her 2009 book, The Environment and the People in American Cities: 1600s-1900s, was the first history of environmental injustice in America. Her 2014 book Toxic Communities has been hailed as a "standard-bearer" for environmental justice scholarship. Her book, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement is a "sweeping social history" that challenges narrative of environmental history and inspires readers to "reconsider nearly everything".

Taylor's award-winning book, The Environment and the People in American Cities (Duke University Press, 2009), focused on the environmental challenges American cities faced in the 17th through 20th centuries. She documented the race, class, and gender dynamics that arose as urban dwellers tried to deal with environmental problems. The book also demonstrated that from the outset environmental inequalities arose in American cities and were perpetuated in deliberate and unintentional ways. An "ambitious" and 'impressive" work covering 500 years of history, The Environment and the People in American Cities is the first of three books, while the second of the series, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement (Duke University Press), was released in 2016. In it, she examines the emergence and rise of the American conservation movement from the mid-1800s to the early 1900s, demonstrating how race, class, and gender influenced every aspect of the movement from the establishment of parks to outdoor recreation and forest conservation; and the movement's links to nineteenth century ideologies. "Far-ranging," "nuanced," and "comprehensive," one scholar suggested that The Rise of the American Conservation Movement documents the movement in ways that will inspire readers to reconsider what they have been previously taught about environmental history.

With funding from the Joyce Foundation, Taylor founded the Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative (MELDI) in 2003. In 2005 she organized a national conference and in 2007 an international one for the purpose of assessing the status of diversity in the environmental field and to plan for enhancing diversity in the future. Several papers presented at the 2007 conference were published in the book, Environment and Social Justice: An International Perspective.

Taylor received a National Science Foundation Minority Post-doctoral Fellowship in 1991 to study ethnic minority environmental activism in Britain. She affiliated with the University College of London's Department of Geography while she conducted her research. In 1992 she obtained a Ford Foundation/Rockefeller Foundation Poverty and the Underclass Post-doctoral Fellowship at the University of Michigan. The appointment was jointly held between the Ford School of Public Policy and the School of Social Work.

Taylor's work on racial exclusion in the environmental movement began in 1989, with her article "Blacks and the Environment: Toward an Explanation of the Concern and Action Gap between Blacks and Whites", and she authored numerous articles on the subject in the early 1990s. In 2014, Taylor authored a groundbreaking report on diversity in environmental organizations. The report's findings, that environmental organizations were failing to represent the diverse American population in their leadership, aroused a firestorm of controversy. The report was commissioned by the Green 2.0 diversity initiative, which continues to track diversity data for the 40 largest environmental organization. To expand on this work, in 2018, Taylor published an updated report that examined the status of diversity in over 2,000 American environmental nonprofits and the extent to which they report their demographic characteristics and diversity activities on the GuideStar reporting system. In the Fall of 2019, Taylor will publish new research on the lack of diversity reporting in environmental organizations, as discussed in a preview of the report released this summer.

Taylor was born and raised in rural Jamaica. She earned a bachelor's of arts in Geography and Biology (with honors) from Northeastern Illinois University in Chicago in 1983. She obtained a master's of forest science from Yale University in 1985. She followed with a master's of art and a master's of philosophy in 1987. She received a combined doctoral degree in sociology and forestry & environmental studies at Yale University in 1991. She was the first African American woman to earn a doctoral degree from F&ES.