Dorceta E. Taylor
Dorceta E. Taylor
Dr. Dorceta E. Taylor is a leading environmental justice scholar who has developed several influential initiatives and written dozens of groundbreaking books and articles. Currently a professor of environmental justice at her alma mater, Yale School of the Environment, Dr. Taylor teaches courses on food insecurity, environmental justice, and more. She is the Program Director of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Sustainability Initiative (JEDSI), a lab dedicated to increasing diversity and opportunities in environmental professions. Dr. Taylor directs two national internship programs, the Environmental Fellows Program for graduate students and the Yale Conservation Scholars- Early Leadership Initiative for undergraduates. She also leads this project, the People of Color Environmental Professionals: Profiles of Courage and Leadership, and the annual New Horizons in Conservation Conference.
“Mentoring is only as good as the protégé’s ability to exercise humility, commit to hard work, recognize good advice, and act on it.” Dorceta E. Taylor, 2024.
Taylor DE, Blondell M. 2023. Examining Disparities in Environmental Grantmaking: Where the Money Goes. New Haven, Connecticut: Yale School of the Environment. doi:DOI:10.13140/RG.2.2.10106.36801.
Taylor DE. 2016. The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection. Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822373971.
Taylor DE. 2014. Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility. NYU Press. Available at: https://nyupress.org/9781479861781/toxic-communities/
Taylor DE. 2009. The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change. Duke University Press. doi:10.1215/9780822392248.
Taylor DE, Lusuegro A, Loong V, et al. 2022 Racial, Gender, and Age Dynamics in Michigan’s Urban and Rural Farmers Markets: Reducing Food Insecurity, and the Impacts of a Pandemic. American Behavioral Scientist. 66(7):894 - 936. doi:10.1177/00027642211013387.
Growing up in rural Jamaica, I became interested in the environment from a young age. One of my tasks was to tend the family rose garden, and I became fascinated by the flowers and butterflies and the countless fruit trees in the yard. I loved going to the garden in the early morning because I could gaze at the waterfall cascading down the hillside like a thin white thread of endless wonder. It was captivating when the cascade was partly obscured by the mist that sometimes blanketed the hillsides.
My grammar schoolteacher opened the door to a magical world when I was eight. One afternoon, the teacher, Nancy Anderson, led our class through the fields and to the banks of the Rio Minho River on which our small school perched. She handed each of us a new notebook. A new notebook was a luxury in a school where most students could not afford to buy their own. As our teacher carefully spelled “Environmental Studies,” we copied the letters precisely, careful not to make a mistake. It was 1965. Our teacher told us that this was a new subject we would be studying. I was mesmerized!
The second awakening came four years later, in 1969, during my first year in high school. I was then a twelve-year-old sitting in the front row of a crowded, sparsely furnished classroom in Kingston, awaiting the arrival of the substitute teacher and contemplating how long they would last before despairing and retreating to the staff room. Being the honors students of the first-year high school cohort, our class had already mastered the art of being disruptive without breaking school rules. Our misdeeds were met with stern warnings and mild punishment.
Our collective rule-bending was well-organized and choreographed. Our favorite tactic was to begin a world knowledge contest before the teacher arrived in the room. Once begun, it was nigh impossible for a neophyte teacher to shift our attention to other subjects. Boys sat on one side of the room and girls on the other. We lobbed questions regarding obscure facts at each other. A moderator kept order and recorded the score on the chalkboard. The game’s object was to settle a question that had plagued us all year: were boys smarter than girls? As talk of “women’s liberation” filtered into our consciousness, the game got more intense. We spent hours in the library after school each day, trying to unearth facts that could be used to stump the opposition.
On this particular day, we were so caught up in the competition that we failed to notice a tall, elegant black man standing at the door. “What is the intraventricular septum?” he asked in a strong baritone. There was stunned silence. It took three or four attempts to get some rough approximation of the answer. Sensing a challenge, the game’s focus shifted; it was now the class against the teacher. He fired questions at us, and we fired questions at him for an hour. We couldn’t stump him.
Up to that point in my life, I had never met anyone who was so bright and had such a presence. Most of our teachers wanted no part of the game; they squelched it as soon as they walked into the room. We were intrigued. We stayed through the entire lunch hour to listen to him. He told us he was a professor and “a learned man.” That evening, I went home and wrote a note to myself in the only private place in the house. I removed my bed from the wall and added one more goal to my list. On the wall, I wrote, “Get a Ph.D.; become a professor and a learned woman.” “The professor,” as our American visitor became known, was in our school for a few more days and vanished. None of us knew his full name or why he had visited our school. For me, he stayed long enough to demonstrate that learning was an enjoyable, life-long undertaking and that a career involving the pursuit of knowledge was possible.
When I decided to become a professor, girls’ career opportunities and aspirations were limited. Even though I had no idea how I would attain my goal, I began pursuing it with intense determination from that age on. I knew that if I studied hard and got good grades, the likelihood of the rest falling into place was greatly enhanced.
In the meantime, my fascination with the environment grew stronger after I was introduced to biology in high school. I specialized in zoology and botany, passing the University of Cambridge ordinary and advanced-level exams. I also entered a teacher-training college and studied to become a teacher while pursuing my Cambridge advanced-level studies. I became a certified high school science teacher in 1977. While teaching, I shared my enthusiasm for the environment with my students. Just before I left Jamaica in 1978, my second-year science class in the girls’ boarding school I taught won the National Junior Science Exhibition award for the project I did with them studying light and shade tolerance of Pinto bean plants. That same year, one of the students I trained also became the regional Spelling Bee champion.
I completed my undergraduate education in the U.S., specializing in biology and geography/environmental studies. At times, I worked full-time and also took a full-time course load. I graduated from Northeastern Illinois University with high honors in 1983. However, I wanted to focus on the relationship between people and the environment for graduate school. I was always concerned with poverty and social inequality (especially as it affected people in developing countries) and wanted to incorporate those concepts fully into my academic pursuits.
Though I loved biology, I found the discipline did not pay much attention to social issues, so I decided to shift my focus to natural resources, environmental studies, and sociology to cultivate my interests. When I was admitted to the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies in 1983, I was the second Black woman admitted to the master’s program in the school’s history. I completed a Master of Forest Science degree in 1985 and was admitted into the Ph.D. program that same year. From 1985 to 1991, I completed a master of arts and a master of philosophy degree, as well as a joint doctorate. I developed an individualized doctoral program between the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Department of Sociology. I am the first Black woman to get a Ph.D. from the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. Founded in 1900, the Yale School of Forestry and Environmental Studies is the oldest school of its kind in the country.
In choosing which graduate school to attend, I faced a dilemma – go to one of the schools that offered full fellowships or take out a large student loan to go to a school where I felt I would get the best education. I chose the latter – and if faced with the same choice today, I would make the same decision.
After completing my first master’s degree, I got several national and university-wide fellowships to pursue doctoral and post-doctoral studies. While a doctoral student, I received a Patricia Roberts Harris Fellowship, a Yale Dissertation Fellowship, a Bouchet Dissertation Fellowship, and a National Research Council Ford Dissertation Fellowship. I also received two Mellon fellowships to conduct dissertation field research in the Virgin Islands and to study organization theory. In 1991, I received a National Science Foundation post-doctoral fellowship to conduct research in England. I also lived in Canada for a year.
In 1992, I applied for post-doctoral and faculty positions at the same time. I received a Rockefeller-Ford post-doctoral fellowship in the University of Michigan’s Poverty and the Underclass program. I was also offered a tenure-track position with a joint appointment in the School of Natural Resources and Environment (SNRE) and the Center for Afroamerican and African Studies (CAAS) simultaneously. I accepted both positions. I spent the first year of my appointment as a post-doctoral fellow and assumed full-time faculty responsibilities in 1993. I was the first and only Black woman hired as a tenure-track faculty by SNRE. I left the University of Michigan in 2020, during the Coronavirus Disease-19 pandemic, to return to my alma mater.
I am a Professor of Environmental Justice at the Yale School of the Environment (YSE). I was the school’s Senior Associate Dean of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion from 2021-2023. I am an affiliate of the Department of Sociology, the Yale Institute of Biospheric Studies, and a Fellow of Hopper College. Throughout my career, I have taught courses in environmental history, environmental politics, environmental justice, environment and development, gender and environment, sociological theory, research methods, tourism, food systems, food access, environmental philanthropy, and poverty and inequality. My research focuses on food insecurity, institutional diversity, green infrastructure, and environmental grantmaking.
I founded and directed the Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative (MELDI) lab and program at the University of Michigan. I developed and am director of the Justice, Equity, Diversity, and Sustainability Initiative (JEDSI) lab and program at the Yale School of the Environment.
I have written several books and national reports. I authored The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality, and Social Change. Published in 2009 by Duke University Press, this book won the Allan Schnaiberg Outstanding Publication Award from the Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association.
I published Toxic Communities: Environmental Racism, Industrial Pollution, and Residential Mobility (New York University Press) in 2016. A third book, The Rise of the American Conservation Movement: Power, Privilege, and Environmental Protection, was published by Duke University Press in 2016.
I publish numerous research articles in a variety of scholarly journals. Some of my most influential reports include Examining Disparities in Environmental Grantmaking: Where the Money Goes (Yale University, 2023); Diversity in Environmental Organizations: Reporting and Transparency (University of Michigan, 2018); Diversity Pathways: Broadening Participation in Environmental Organizations (University of Michigan, 2018); and The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations: Mainstream NGOs, Foundations, Government Agencies (University of Michigan, 2014).
I am an associate editor of the American Behavioral Scientist. In that role, I produced two special journal issues in 2021 and 2022. I am the editor of the first Environmental Justice Encyclopedia. The three-volume set will be published in 2025 by Sage Publications.
I conceptualized and managed the development of the People of Color Environmental Professionals: Profiles of Courage and Leadership. I released an early version of the profiles while at the University of Michigan. In 2024, the updated electronic database opened at Yale. The database contains several hundred profiles.
I developed and directed three national diversity pathway programs to facilitate career development opportunities for undergraduates and graduate students who embark on careers in the environmental sector. The multicultural programs focus on historically underrepresented students in the environmental field. Between 2016 and 2024, the Environmental Fellows Program provided over 250 internships to master’s and doctoral students. From 2016-2021, the Doris Duke Conservation Scholars Program at the University of Michigan-Yale provided two-year internships to 101 undergraduates, and between 2022-2024, the Yale Conservation Scholars-Early Leadership Initiative provided two-year internships to 59 undergraduates.
I organized two national and international institutional diversity conferences in 2005 and 2007 while at the University of Michigan. Since 2018, I have organized the annual New Horizons in Conservation Conference that allows students, faculty, and environmental professionals to get together to focus on diversity in the environmental movement and environmental organizations or agencies. The conference attracts hundreds of participants worldwide.
Some of my awards include a feature in the Smithsonian Institution National Portrait Gallery exhibition Forces of Nature: Voices that Shaped Environmentalism, which runs from October 20, 2023, to September 2, 2024. I am an Honorary Fellow of the American College of Environmental Lawyers. I have been awarded the Women in Sustainability Award, presented with the Seal of Michigan by the Michigan Legislative Black Caucus. I received the Wilbur Lucious Cross Medal from the Yale Graduate School Alumni Association. I also received the EcoWorks Sustainable Communities Champion Award and was featured in the Smithsonian Institution Anacostia Museum’s Women in Leadership exhibit. I received the National Science Foundation Presidential Award for Excellence in Science, Mathematics & Engineering, Mentoring award. I was the Freudenberg Lifetime Achievement Award recipient and the Women in Conservation Rachel Carson Award recipient issued by the National Audubon Society. The Sierra Club of Michigan awarded me the Burton B. Barnes Award for Academic Excellence. The Environment and Technology Section of the American Sociological Association awarded me the Fred Buttel Outstanding Contribution to the Field of Environmental Sociology Award.
I conduct reviews for scholarly publications, government agencies, and fellowship programs. I also serve on the boards of journals and environmental organizations and give congressional testimonies when called on.
Nothing in life is easy, and embarking on an environmental career is not a walk in the park. In many ways, the easy option for me would have been to continue on the pre-med path and become a physician or a biomedical researcher. Subjects like biology, botany, and zoology came effortlessly, but I would have been extremely unhappy with those choices. I took the road less traveled by switching from a purely natural science degree to a social and natural science blend. This was risky – especially since the switch did not occur till I was in graduate school, and at the time I made the switch, I had little social science background. However, once I decided on the career I wanted and finally figured out the steps I needed to take to attain it, I was willing to go against conventional wisdom, be ostracized by my peers, take the risk of being the “only one” or the “first one” to achieve my objectives.
At first, I just “toughed it out,” but later, I realized that many great leaders or thinkers followed unconventional pathways. Simply following the crowd often leaves little or no room for innovation. Over time, I began to view my unconventional path and choices as preparation for something unusual – I don’t know yet what that might be.
There are ebbs and flows to everyone’s career. The periods of normalcy are sometimes interrupted by intense highs and lows. One such low point occurred on a hot, humid day in August 1987. I was a second-year doctoral student attending an academic conference in Washington, D.C. Somewhat apprehensively, I walked into a social gathering of people in my discipline. I met a few professors and students from other universities. I was starting to feel comfortable when an older gentleman approached me – the only Person of Color in the room – and said in a loud, somewhat agitated voice, “What are you doing here? Deliveries are in the rear!” Nothing prepares one for moments like this, and everything you tell yourself you should have said or done completely escapes you (they usually come back after the moment has passed). The room went silent, and time stood still.
All fifty or so people in the room stared at me. I looked at the man and said, “The same thing everybody else is doing here.” I don’t quite remember what else I said. I knew I took a sip of my drink and returned to the person I was conversing with before the interruption. Two competing thoughts raced through my mind for the next little while – leave the room and conference immediately or stay. Fight or flight. Instinct took over, and I stayed. I did not fully realize it then, but I was fighting one of the most significant battles of my career and holding my ground.
It occurred to me that no one said anything. After an awkward pause lasting a few seconds, everyone returned to their wine, cheese, and conversation. I later learned that the man who confronted me was a “big name” professor in the discipline. Indeed, he is well renowned in the field and has a reputation as a liberal thinker. It was a name that showed up in my citations. About an hour after confronting me, the man approached me again and quietly said, “I am sorry I said that to you. You were wearing white, and I thought you were the server. I just came out of a long meeting; I am tired, and I just snapped.”
No one else in the gathering said anything about the event till 2010 when the student I was talking to when the incident occurred sent me an email raising the issue again. As it turned out, he was a first-year doctoral student studying under the professor and felt powerless to intervene. In the few seconds I pondered staying or leaving the room, I didn’t think of the full ramifications of the decision. Leaving the room would have meant leaving the discipline (and if I was going to do that, I wanted to do it on my terms).
As it turns out, to this day, just about every research article or book submitted for publication, research grant submitted for funding, review for tenure, and interviews and recommendations for jobs go through some of the people in that room. Though I did not know it then, the decision to stay in the room meant I had to figure out how to have a long-term professional relationship with the people in that room.
I haven’t allowed events like this to cloud my view of the field or the people in it. Over the years, I have met and worked with many people who have been incredibly gracious and generous with their time. My advisors at Yale, William Burch, Paul DiMaggio, Wendell Bell, and Kai Erikson, helped me learn to think analytically. At the same time, they pushed me to produce work of very high standards. They were willing to give advice when I sought it. Throughout my profession, I have always sought advice from people who are more senior and who understand how systems, institutions, and networks function. I maintain contact with people who understand the unwritten and informal rules of the game since these are crucial to one’s career.
On a larger scale, I have maintained contact with a large number of people who I can always count on to give me a perspective that comes from outside the institution I work in.
I enjoy being a professor and would do nothing else even though I could earn much more money in other jobs. However, money has never driven my career choices – freedom to control my time, thought processes, and area of research, as well as the chance to work with young people, have always been far more important to me than money.
Furthermore, I cannot imagine myself working in any other field. I discovered early on that I do not like rigid routines, office confinement, or constant monitoring. I work best when I control my time and creativity. Anyone acquainted with me knows they can find me working late at night or in the wee hours of the morning. I do so willingly; however, I do not want to work those hours from an office building or a lab.
Academia is the ultimate place to allow ideas to flow freely, and work environments are structured to maximize outputs. I like meeting and working with students, teaching them, and watching the “light bulb go on” in their heads. I mentor many students at Yale University and elsewhere. I like the growth and progress one sees in students as they mature and develop their careers. This is the most exciting part of my career.
“Mentoring is only as good as the protégé’s ability to exercise humility, commit to hard work, recognize good advice, and act on it” (Dorceta E. Taylor, 2024).
To young people considering a career in the environmental field, if you don’t have a mentor, get one! Once you have a mentor, be aware that the protégé plays an active role in the mentoring process. The protégé sets goals, seeks out good mentors, solicits advice, acts on the advice given, and makes the adjustments necessary to mature, meet their goals, and flourish. Above all, a protégé achieves a lot more if they are respectful and honor the time and wisdom a mentor shares.