BIOGRAPHY
Bron Taylor was born in Long Beach California in 1955, lived most of his early years in South Pasadena, and was fortunate to move to Ventura California on his 13th birthday in 1968, where he became a beach rat and developed a love for the ocean, went to high school, and secured a job within the California State Park System, first as an ocean lifeguard, eventually also serving as a State Park Peace Officer.
While working weekends and summers at various Southen California beaches between 1974 and 1989 (and sometimes also for an ambulance company as an Emergency Medical Technician) he earned degrees in Psychology and Religious Studies at California State University Chico, an MA in religious ethics from Fuller Seminary in Pasadena, and a Ph.D. in Social Ethics from the University of Southern California (in 1988). Along the way he engaged in social and environmental activism, and took on his most important role, as a husband and father.
In 1989 he became an Assistant Professor at the University of Wisconsin Oshkosh, and promoted rapidly to Associate and full Professor, while also leading a faculty initiative to establish its Environmental Studies program, serving as its director from 1993-2002. In 2002 he assumed the Samuel S. Hill Ethics Chair at the University of Florida, where he was recruited to anchor the world’s first graduate program focusing on religion and nature. He has been deeply involved in research initiatives in Europe, and was honored by his selection as a Carson Fellow at the Rachel Carson Center in Munich Germany in 2012.
In his academic work he has had the privilege of traveling widely, meeting, interviewing, and working with some of the most compassionate and passionate people on earth, all whom in their own ways are struggling to prevent further erosion of the earth’s biocultural diversity. Today, he cannot imagine doing anything else, except returning to the beach and surfing a lot more.