Though she loved nature and the environment from an early age, Dorceta Taylor often found herself as the only Black student in her science classes in the United States, a new experience for her after growing up in Jamaica. Throughout her American education, she recalled being told that “Black people weren’t interested in the environment.”
“For the first 20 years of my life,” Taylor said, “it was everybody eats, everybody breathes air, everybody needs clean water, and so that racial dimension to it wasn’t there.”
For decades, the public image of the environmental movement was narrowly White and male — a picture that erased the long history of Black, Indigenous and other communities of color that organized around environmental harm, and left the movement incomplete. As an environmental sociologist, Taylor has dedicated her career to reframing and expanding representation in the environmental justice movement. One of the earliest pioneers in the field, she blazed a trail of firsts, including as the first Black woman to earn a doctoral degree from the Yale School of Environment, then called the School of Forestry and Environmental Studies, in 1991. She also helped to create one of the first environmental justice programs in the country as a professor at the University of Michigan in the 1990s.
So, it made sense when she was approached to spearhead a landmark project — editing the world’s first environmental justice encyclopedia. The one-of-a-kind resource, published this month, documents key events, institutions and people of color in the environmental justice movement from all over the world to connect the dots between similar themes at home and abroad. Until now, there wasn’t any comprehensive text to cite or reference global environmental justice issues.
The opportunity to edit the landmark literature disrupts the status quo, she said. As a Black woman with an international background who received higher education in the United States, her role challenges who traditionally gets to be seen and represented in the environmental field, she said.
“It’s really kind of poetic justice that within the space, I could have said ‘no,’ and then I really probably could’ve published about 30 research articles in the best journals,” she said.
The project is supported by Yale University, where she currently sits as a Wangari Maathai professor of environmental sociology — the first endowed chair in the field named after a Black woman. The situational irony is not lost on her: the Ivy League institution, which created the first graduate school of forestry in the country in 1900, would have never initially accepted her in that era. Even in 1983, Taylor was only the second Black woman to ever attend Yale’s School of Environment. Essentially, one of the founding institutions of the historically White, male, and Eurocentric field supported a Black woman raised in the Caribbean to create the first international compilation of its study.
“It’s a way of also saying to the space, when you hired me, you also hired this part of me. And yes, I can do an environmental justice encyclopedia. Let some alumni roll over in their graves.”
Her project, the SAGE Encyclopedia of Environmental Justice, is more than 360 entries and 800,000 words, all woven together by Taylor in three tightly bound volumes. She says only about five other people around the world could’ve pulled it off. It covers common themes like environmental quality and health, institutional diversity and community displacement. The encyclopedia is designed for academics and activists alike, she said, as a critical context that pulls together the threads of environmental justice to be understood as both “a scholarly field and a global call to action.” She said that having the “lived perspective” of being a Black woman, who often bears the brunt of the effects of environmental justice issues, informed her decision to be inclusive with the material, which includes representation by 26 nations.
Though the effects of climate change are disproportionately felt by Black women, they are also underrepresented in the climate and environmental fields, experts say.
“People of color make up nearly 40 percent of the U.S. population, but we don’t exceed a 12-16 percent ‘green ceiling’ of representation in the climate sector, and Black women actually have among the lowest retention rate,” Wanjiku “Wawa” Gatheru, founder of the nonprofit Black Girl Environmentalist, said during a 2024 conference at the Aspen Institute. The environmental space is historically whitewashed and masculinized, Gatheru said, prompting calls for “eco-womanism,” a framework that builds upon the environmental justice space with consideration to the experiences of Black women and women of color.
Taylor says the environmental field still is overwhelmingly White — especially at her “senior” level. As she wrote in a personal essay for the Sierra Club, even an award-winning Yale professor with a doctorate who has authored several environmental justice books and landmark reports on diversity is mistaken for someone who doesn’t belong. Black people and people of color are presumed to “not have any authority at all” in environmental spaces, she said.
To combat this erasure, Taylor passes the knowledge of those she learned from onto her students. This includes the teachings of Hazel M. Johnson, affectionately regarded as the “mother of the environmental justice movement” for her prominent grassroots activism in Chicago’s South Side.
“We know her. We see her. We heard her talk,” Taylor said. “Most people don’t really realize the amount of work activists like those did to put these issues on the map.”
For years, environmental justice scholars tried to answer the question: How do you identify something without being able to call it by its name?
“There was no name for environmental justice till the ’90s. It didn’t have a name,” she said. “The books weren’t there. The resources weren’t there, so you had to create everything you were studying; you had to prove to people that ‘I’m not crazy,’ this stuff exists.”
Progress has come far, but the documentation of environmental justice work is still at risk of erasure. After Donald Trump returned to office, Taylor’s students — who worked with her on the project — initially feared that the administration’s actions would make contributors less inclined to participate in the project.
“Because if you read what Trump said should happen, this book should never have been even finished,” Taylor said. “But we all kind of said, ‘no, we’re going at it.’ Undergraduates stepped up and wrote articles, and they felt like they were really contributing to the EJ cause and not being threatened and bullied into stopping it. So that was a really nice moment to see.”
Now, thanks to the help of her students and hundreds of contributors, including scholars, advocates and community leaders, readers can find hundreds of articles, including those from former Georgia House Rep. and political activist Stacey Abrams, and Benjamin Chavis, who coined the term “environmental justice,” authored the pivotal Toxic Wastes and Race report and formerly headed the NAACP. It also draws parallels between environmental issues at home and abroad, like the links between the 1911 Triangle Shirtwaist Factory fire in New York and the Rana Plaza collapse in Bangladesh in 2013, both tragedies that led to the deaths of low-paid garment workers, who were mostly women, and from marginalized immigrant communities.
Some of the encyclopedia’s most striking material involves connections that have never been previously made, according to Taylor, like entries that document the role of eugenics in shaping the American environmental movement and its teachings in historically Black colleges.
“The stories speak for themselves,” she said. “You will see things in it that are the truth, the whole truth, the unvarnished truth.”
