Resources: An Annotated Reading List

A reading list is only useful if someone tells you what to pick up first. These are the books, essays, reports and tools we return to most often when writing about who works in, leads and benefits from environmental work in the United States. Each entry says what the item is and why we think it earns a place on your shelf. For longer explanations of the major studies, see our page on landmark reports; for short biographies of many of the authors below, see People.

How to use this list

If you are new to the subject, try one history (Taylor or Finney), one book on environmental justice (Bullard), and one personal account (Lanham or Kimmerer). If you hire staff or recruit board members, start with the section on organizational diversity. If you run programs for young people, the pipeline section is the place to begin. We have only listed items whose author, publisher and date we could confirm, and we have left out anything we could not.

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Essays & Articles

9 Rules for the Black Birdwatcher

J. Drew Lanham. Orion Magazine, 2013.

A short, wry list that stays with you for years. Lanham uses humor to describe the calculations a Black birder makes in rural America that white birders rarely have to think about. It makes a good opener for a staff conversation.

Climate Change Isn't the First Existential Threat

Mary Annaïse Heglar. Published on Medium, 2019.

Heglar argues that Black Americans have long lived with threats to their survival, and that a climate movement which treats existential danger as something new has a lot to learn from the civil rights movement. A useful corrective for anyone who assumes communities of color are latecomers to environmental concern.

Race, Class, Gender, and American Environmentalism

Dorceta E. Taylor. USDA Forest Service, Pacific Northwest Research Station, General Technical Report PNW-GTR-534, 2002.

A free government report that packs a remarkable amount of history into a short space: how class, race and gender shaped who joined which environmental causes, from early wilderness preservation through urban reform to the environmental justice movement. A good primer before tackling Taylor's longer books.

A Personal View on the Importance and Imperative of Diversity Work

Felicia Marcus. In Diversity and the Future of the U.S. Environmental Movement, Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 2007.

A candid essay by a senior land-conservation executive on why years of good intentions had produced so little change. Read our explainer on the Marcus essay for a summary and what it means for land trusts today.

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Books

Dumping in Dixie

Robert D. Bullard. Westview Press, 1990.

The book that gave the environmental justice movement much of its early evidence base. Bullard documents how Black communities in the South fought the siting of landfills, incinerators and polluting plants. Still the best place to understand why the movement grew from civil rights organizing rather than from mainstream conservation.

Black Faces, White Spaces

Carolyn Finney. University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Finney, a geographer, looks at how images, history and policy shaped African Americans' relationship with the outdoors, and why the "great outdoors" has so often been pictured as white. Essential for anyone who writes outreach materials or chooses the photographs on a website.

The Rise of the American Conservation Movement

Dorceta E. Taylor. Duke University Press, 2016.

A detailed history of how wealthy, mostly white men built the institutions of American conservation, and who was excluded or displaced along the way. Long, but it explains why today's organizations look the way they do.

The Home Place

J. Drew Lanham. Milkweed Editions, 2016.

A memoir of growing up on family land in Edgefield, South Carolina, and becoming a wildlife ecologist. Lanham writes about birds, family and race with the same close attention. A good gift for a young person who loves nature and has never seen someone like them in a field guide.

Braiding Sweetgrass

Robin Wall Kimmerer. Milkweed Editions, 2013.

Kimmerer, a botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, sets Indigenous knowledge beside Western science and argues for a relationship with land based on reciprocity. Her shorter book The Serviceberry (Scribner, 2024) extends the argument to economics.

Trace

Lauret Savoy. Counterpoint, 2015.

A geologist with African American, Euro-American and Native American ancestry traces how the American landscape carries the marks of removal, slavery and segregation. Especially good on place names and what they hide.

Nature Swagger

Rue Mapp. Chronicle Books, 2022.

A visual, celebratory collection of stories and photographs of Black people outdoors, from the founder of Outdoor Afro. Where many books on this list document exclusion, this one shows joy and belonging. Worth keeping in a nature center or classroom.

All We Can Save

Edited by Ayana Elizabeth Johnson and Katharine K. Wilkinson. One World, 2020.

An anthology of essays and poems by women working on climate, many of them women of color. A good sampler of voices and approaches.

Black Nature

Edited by Camille T. Dungy. University of Georgia Press, 2009.

An anthology of four centuries of African American nature poetry. A reminder that Black writers have always written about land, animals and weather, even when the canon ignored them.

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Organizational Diversity

The State of Diversity in Environmental Organizations

Dorceta E. Taylor, for Green 2.0, 2014.

The study that put a number on the "green ceiling": people of color made up no more than about 16 percent of staff and boards at the environmental groups, agencies and foundations surveyed. Our reports page explains the findings and their limits.

Diversity and the Future of the U.S. Environmental Movement

Edited by Emily Enderle. Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies, 2007.

A collection of essays by practitioners and scholars on why the movement had stayed so homogeneous and what might change it. It captures the state of the conversation just before the issue became mainstream.

Green 2.0 transparency report cards

Green 2.0, published periodically.

Green 2.0 asks environmental nonprofits and foundations to disclose staff and board demographics and publishes the results. The report cards are only as good as what organizations choose to share, but they are the most consistent public record of whether the numbers are moving.

Diversifying the Conservation Movement

Environmental Diversity.

Our own brief on diversifying conservation sets out the case, the common mistakes and a practical checklist for organizations of any size.

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Outreach & Partnerships

The Nature Gap

Center for American Progress and Hispanic Access Foundation, 2020.

Maps who lives near natural areas and who does not, and finds that communities of color are far more likely to live in places that have lost nature to development. Good for grant proposals and for deciding where a new preserve or park would do the most good.

Racial and ethnic diversity of park visitors and non-visitors

National Park Service, Comprehensive Survey of the American Public, 2008-2009 (report published 2011).

A national survey that asked people who visit national parks, and people who do not, about their experiences and reasons. It documents clear gaps by race and ethnicity and is useful for understanding that non-visitors give varied reasons, from cost and distance to not knowing much about parks.

Outdoor Participation Report

Outdoor Foundation, annual.

An industry-funded yearly snapshot of who takes part in outdoor recreation, broken down by age, income, race and ethnicity. Handy for tracking trends, though participation is not the same as access or belonging.

Jemez Principles for Democratic Organizing

Adopted at a 1996 meeting in Jemez, New Mexico.

Six short principles, drafted by environmental and economic justice activists, for how organizations should work together: be inclusive, organize from the bottom up, let people speak for themselves, and build just relationships. Required reading before any large group proposes a "partnership" with a grassroots one.

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Educational Pipeline

Last Child in the Woods

Richard Louv. Algonquin Books, 2005.

The book that popularized the idea of "nature-deficit disorder" and helped launch a wave of programs to get children outdoors. Read it alongside Finney: Louv's diagnosis is broad, and critics have pointed out that it can overlook the structural barriers some children face.

SEEDS

Ecological Society of America.

The society's long-running program (Strategies for Ecology Education, Diversity and Sustainability) supports undergraduates from underrepresented backgrounds with field trips, research fellowships and travel to the society's annual meeting. A model worth studying for any professional association.

MANRRS

Minorities in Agriculture, Natural Resources and Related Sciences.

A national society with student chapters at many universities and an annual conference and career fair. For students, a ready-made network; for employers, a place to recruit that goes beyond the usual job boards. See our organizations page for more groups working on the pipeline.

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Environmental Justice

Principles of Environmental Justice

First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit, 1991.

Seventeen principles adopted in Washington, DC, that still serve as the movement's founding statement. Short enough to read in ten minutes, and worth rereading every few years.

Toxic Wastes and Race at Twenty, 1987-2007

Robert D. Bullard, Paul Mohai, Robin Saha and Beverly Wright, for the United Church of Christ, 2007.

The follow-up to the landmark 1987 study, using better methods and finding that the disparities had not gone away. Explained in detail on our reports page.

From the Ground Up

Luke W. Cole and Sheila R. Foster. New York University Press, 2001.

Case studies of communities fighting environmental hazards, written by two lawyers. Especially good on why legal victories alone rarely end the fight.

The Wrong Complexion for Protection

Robert D. Bullard and Beverly Wright. New York University Press, 2012.

How government responses to disasters and contamination have treated Black communities, from floods to Hurricane Katrina. Directly relevant to climate adaptation planning.

A Terrible Thing to Waste

Harriet A. Washington. Little, Brown Spark, 2019.

A science writer's account of how lead, air pollution and other exposures harm children's brains, and how those exposures fall along lines of race and income.

Just Sustainabilities

Edited by Julian Agyeman, Robert D. Bullard and Bob Evans. MIT Press, 2003.

The collection that argued sustainability without justice is not sustainable. Academic in places, but the framework has shaped planning and policy ever since.

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Data & Mapping

American Community Survey

U.S. Census Bureau.

The starting point for almost any question about who lives where. Neighborhood-level estimates of race, income, language, age and commuting are available through census.gov.

CalEnviroScreen

California Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment.

A state screening tool that combines pollution burden with population characteristics to identify the communities most affected. Even outside California, its method and maps are a clear example of how such tools are built.

Mapping Inequality

Digital Scholarship Lab, University of Richmond.

Digitized 1930s federal "redlining" maps for cities across the country. Pair it with a 2020 study in the journal Climate by Jeremy Hoffman, Vivek Shandas and Nicholas Pendleton, which found that formerly redlined neighborhoods tend to be noticeably hotter today. Explore the maps online.

ParkScore and ParkServe

Trust for Public Land.

ParkScore ranks large US cities on their park systems; ParkServe maps which residents live within a ten-minute walk of a park. Both are useful for showing where park investment is missing.

EJAtlas

Environmental Justice Atlas.

A global, crowd-sourced database of environmental conflicts, searchable by country and issue. Useful for seeing US struggles alongside similar ones elsewhere; visit ejatlas.org.

A note on federal tools

Several federal screening tools and data portals that many groups relied on were taken offline or changed in 2025. Independent and university archives have preserved some of them. If you use an archived copy, check which year's data it contains before you cite it.