The University of Toledo

For nearly a decade, the Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative, a project housed in the University of Michigan’s School of Natural Resources and Environment, has worked to increase diversity in environmental organizations as well as the broader environmental movement.

Taylor

Dr. Dorceta Taylor, UM associate professor and founder and program director of the initiative, will present a lecture titled “Environment, Social Inequality and Sustainability: Understanding the Past and Working Toward the Future,” Thursday, Feb. 25, from 3:30 to 5:30 p.m. in Student Union Room 2584 on Main Campus.

Her lecture will focus on topics related to social movement analysis; environmental justice; leisure and natural resource use; urban and rural poverty; and race, gender and ethnic relations.

“Dr. Taylor’s work is exciting due to its simultaneous importance to society and its accessibility by the public,” said Dr. Dr. Rubin Patterson, UT interim director of the Africana Studies Program and professor of sociology.

“The thrust of her work is twofold,” Patterson explained. “First, she reminds us that we all suffer from environmental degradation in varying degrees, and we all have opportunities, if not the obligation, to build green economies in sustainable communities. In addition, although the working class and communities of color suffer disproportionately from environmental degradation, they have tended to be less involved in academic programs and mainstream organizations focusing on addressing that degradation, as well as building green economies in sustainable communities.”

Taylor’s Multicultural Environmental Leadership Development Initiative studies the status of diversity in the environmental pipeline in an effort to help produce future environmental leaders from more diverse communities.

She has conducted four national studies of racial and gender diversity in the environmental field. She wrote a book, The Environment and the People in American Cities, 1600s-1900s: Disorder, Inequality and Social Change, published last year by Duke University Press. Taylor is working on a companion book that will cover conservation history and environmental justice history.

“I believe that each person has the capacity to learn and get excited about environmental issues,” Taylor wrote on her faculty profile UM Web page. “I think a thorough understanding of the past informs present thinking and actions.”

Her free, public lecture is sponsored by UT’s Africana Studies Program, Office of Multicultural Student Services, President’s Lecture Series on Diversity, Catharine S. Eberly Center for Women, and the departments of Sociology and Anthropology, Environmental Sciences and Environmental Studies, and Women’s and Gender Studies.

For more information, contact the African Studies Program at 419.530.7252.

This entry was posted  on  Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010 at  5:44 am and is filed under  Events, UToday.
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