BRON TAYLOR
Personal Statement
Because our values are embedded in our own stories and these in turn grow from the broader narratives of our cultures, here is a brief personal statement, offered in the hopes that it will help those reading my published work to better understand and evaluate it.
Born and raised in Southern California, my earliest memories include being unable to bicycle home from a swimming pool because of air pollution-induced "lung burn," and the outrage I felt at the bulldozing for new homes of my childhood woodland playground near Los Angeles. Moving to the coast in 1968, I found cleaner air and discovered a love for the ocean, and worked for 15 years as an ocean lifeguard and peace officer for the California State Department of Parks and Recreation, while pursuing undergraduate and advanced degrees.
My enduring interest in radical religions, as well as in environmental ethics, politics, and related policy issues, was spawned during an undergraduate course on Latin American Liberation Theology in the mid 1970s. It examined the religious ideas, social analyses, and political impacts of such movements. Through this course I began to understand the many connections between the violation of human rights and environmental degradation.
To pursue these issues I entered Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, focusing my studies on liberation theology and religious ethics, while serving as the chair of its student-led Human Concerns Committee. Fueled by youthful idealism we campaigned for social justice, promoted divestment in South Africa, fought U.S. military involvement in Latin America, and sought to eradicate nuclear weapons. A prominent Rector and Rabbi (in Pasadena and Los Angeles), noticed the impact of our efforts on campus and asked me to serve as the initial director of the Interfaith Center to Reverse the Arms Race. I agreed, and afterward, enrolled at the University of Southern California, earning a Ph.D. in Social Ethics in 1988.
Throughout my undergraduate and graduate years, working in urban state parks, I learned a lot about urban violence, human stupidity and courage, and resource conflicts over public lands. I saw California Brown Pelicans disappear from the coast due to DDT poisoning but return a number of years later, when their numbers boomeranged after the pesticide was banned. These experiences intensified my desire to bring ethical reflection down from the ivory tower into the morally muddy landscape of everyday life.
About the time I was finishing my dissertation exploring empirically the impacts of affirmative action policies on ordinary people, and using my own empirical data as grist for ethical reflection on these policies, I noticed that environmentalists had begun to use sabotage in their efforts to arrest environmental decline. I soon surmised that, like the liberation movements I had studied abroad, the emerging, 'radical environmental' groups were animated by religious perceptions and ideals. Intrigued, I left for the woods to learn more. This turned into a long-term research trajectory exploring the many dimensions of and forms of contemporary grassroots environmentalism, especially the most radical ones.
This research drew me increasingly to the environmental sciences, in part as a means to evaluate the apocalyptic environmental claims the activists I had encountered were making. I became convinced of the importance interdisciplinary Environmental Studies to the quest to establish (and in some cases restore) environmentally sustainable lifeways. Consequently, I led a faculty initiative to create an environmental studies program after assuming my first teaching position at the University of Wisconsin.
In the last several years my research into the religious dimensions of contemporary environmentalism broadened yet again into an interest in the role of religion in all nature-human relationships. Thus, it drew me to the emerging field known as Religion and Ecology and to my editorship of the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature, which has helped provide me with the background needed to develop a graduate program to explore these themes. I am now editing the Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature, and Culture and continue to help develop the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture.
My most recent book, Dark Green Religion examines some of the most promising and problematic aspects of environmental thought and action that have emerged since Charles Darwin published On the Origin of Species on November 24, 1859. My hope is that my collaborative efforts, personal research, and citizen activism, I will contribute in some small way to the conservation of the earth’s biological and cultural treasures.