Professor
- Religion & Nature, Environmental & Social Ethics, Environmental Movements & Politics
Ph.D. University of Southern California
Bron Taylor's website provides access to his research, publications, presentations, initiatives, courses, as well as a direct link to his Curriculum Vitae (resume).
Bron Taylor is one of the world’s leading scholars in the field of religion and nature, and a core faculty member in UF’s Graduate Program in Religion and Nature, and Fellow of the Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society in Munich Germany.
He is the Editor in Chief of the award winning Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2005), and he founded the International Society for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, and its affiliated Journal for the Study of Religion, Nature and Culture, a quarterly journal, that he has also edited since 2007. In demand as a speaker, Professor Taylor has given over fifty keynote or invited lectures in eighteen countries, and over eighty more presentations in the United States, not counting dozens more at professional meetings.
Taylor’s own research focuses on the emotional, spiritual, ethical and political dimensions of environmental movements, both historically and in the contemporary world. He has led and participated in a variety of international initiatives promoting the conservation of biological and cultural diversity. His books include Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (2010), Ecological Resistance Movements: the Global Emergence of Radical and Popular Environmentalism (1995), and Affirmative Action at Work: Law, Politics and Ethics (1992).
Before coming to UF in 2002, Taylor taught at the University of Wisconsin, Oshkosh, where he led an initiative to create a Bachelor’s degree program in Environmental Studies and became its director. Before that he served as Lifeguard and Peace Officer for the California State Department of Parks and Recreation. He received his Ph.D. in Social Ethics from the University of Southern California in 1988.
Recent awards
- Carson Fellow, Rachel Carson Center for Environment and Society, Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität, Munich, Germany (2011)
- University of Florida Research Foundation Professorship (2010-2012)
- The American Library Association’s Outstanding Reference Source award (2006) and Choice’s Outstanding Academic Title of 2005, for the Encyclopedia of Religion and Nature (2006)
Recent publications
- Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future (University of California Press, 2010).
- Avatar and Nature Spirituality, editor and contributor (Wilfrid Laurier University Press, Environmental Humanities Series), forthcoming, 2013.
- Civil Society in the Age of Monitory Democracy (tentative title) edited with N. Witoszek and L. Trägårdh (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).
- “Is Green Religion an Oxymoron?: Biocultural Evolution and Earthly Spirituality,” in Marc Bekoff, ed., Ignoring Nature noMore (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).
- “Kenya’s Green Belt Movement: Contributions, Conflict, Contradictions, and Complications in a Prominent ENGO”, forthcoming in Civil Society in the Age of Monitory Democracy (Oxford and New York: Berghahn Books, 2013).
- “Wilderness, Spirituality and Biodiversity in North America: tracing an environmental history from Occidental roots to Earth Day,” in Wilderness Mythologies: Wilderness in the History of Religions, ed. Laura Feldt (Berlin: De Gruyter, 2012), 293-324.
- “Earth Religion and Radical Religious Reformation,” in Moral Ground: Eighty Visionaries on Why It’s Wrong to Wreck the World. Eds. Kathleen Dean Moore and Michael P. Nelson (San Antonio, Texas: Trinity University Press, 2010), 379-386.