Peter Taylor (environmentalist)

Education

Born in January 1948, Taylor was educated at Cowbridge Grammar School in Glamorgan, Wales from where he won an Open Scholarship to St Catherine's College, Oxford University. He graduated with honours in Natural Sciences from the School of Zoology in 1970. As a student he led a successful inter-university biological expedition to East Africa; After six years of what he describes in his autobiography Shiva's Rainbow as an adventurer and explorer, including a solo vehicle-crossing of the Sahara and climbing the Eiger, he returned to Oxford to study Social Anthropology under the linguistic anthropologist Edwin Ardener. Taylor has been a member of the Institute of Biology and is a Certified Biologist, a former member of the International Union of Radioecologists, the International Society for Radiation Protection and the British Ecological Society. He is currently a member of the Royal Anthropological Institute.

Political Ecology Research Group

Taylor left his academic studies in anthropology order to develop the Political Ecology Research Group (PERG) which he founded in 1976. Eschewing the academic elements of political ecology and the need for theory in favour of political involvement, the group pioneered scientific and legal support for environmental policy initiatives and worked closely with Greenpeace International, Trade Unions and at times government agencies. The group held copyright on all its work and published over 20 research reports between 1978 and 1992. Taylor published an account of the anti-nuclear movement in The Ecologist - a text used by the Open University for its Control of Technology Course, an on assessments of nuclear risk in the science journal Nature.

Taylor became a public figure following the 1977 Windscale Inquiry into nuclear fuel reprocessing during which he exposed the risks of nuclear waste storage and mounted a successful campaign against radioactive discharges to the marine environment – his work was widely reported in the national press, New Scientist, The Ecologist and the New Internationalist. Between 1980 and 1992 he became an advisor to a wide spectrum of organisations, ranging from government agencies to environmental NGOs, appearing on TV and radio on issues of nuclear risk and pollution. His work uncovered the health impact of the Windscale Fire in 1957 - in the PERG report RR-7, and in association with Yorkshire TV, the excess of childhood cancers around Sellafield. He served on the government commission into nuclear waste dumping at sea (chaired by Sir Fred Holliday) which recommended the practice be banned. He also sat on a research advisory group on nuclear waste management set up by the Department of Environment – resigning when he felt government were not allowing time for detailed comparative assessment of the options.

The work of PERG played a role in limiting the development of nuclear fuel reprocessing and the 'plutonium economy', particularly in Germany, cleaning up discharges to the Irish Sea, altering perceptions of the risks of ionising radiation and the consequences of reactor meltdowns. The group also produced the first study in renewable energy strategies in a report for the European Parliament in 1980; the first comparative study of organic and conventional agriculture, and the first UK study of forestry as carbon sequestration.

Taylor involved both of his brothers during the 1980s campaigns, with Ron infiltrating the US Nevada weapons test site and leading the Greenpeace climb of Big Ben and Robert heading the Greenpeace international strategy on chemical wastes.

In 1992, PERG evolved into an international network of independent experts on terrestrial and marine ecosystems – Terramarès – to carry out critical science policy analysis. This group worked collectively and individually behind the scenes in several important developments – with Professor Jackson Davis helping to lay the foundation for the Framework Climate Convention, and in Clean Production Strategies and the Precautionary Principle with Tim Jackson (now Professor of Sustainable Development at the University of Surrey); and further work on energy strategies with Gordon Thompson who now leads the Institute for Resource and Security Studies in Cambridge, Massachusetts (ref IRSS). Taylor's work on ocean pollution culminated in 1993 with a critique of the UN's ocean protection system in the peer-reviewed journal Bulletin of Marine Pollution.

Beyond Conservation

He then moved from Oxford to North Wales to follow up his long standing interests in wildlife conservation and shamanism. As a member of the British Association of Nature Conservationists he organised the conference 'Wilderness Britain' in 1995 and organised a National Trust seminar on wilderness and wildland values at its Centennial Conference. He was a keynote speaker at the BANC/National Trust 1999 'Nature in Transition' conference in July 1999 and co-authored the National Trust's document 'Call for the Wild'. His many articles in BANC's journal ECOS contributed to the new wave of consciousness in conservation known as 'rewilding' culminating in 2005 with the publication of Beyond Conservation and the founding of the Wildland Network. In this work Taylor argues that conservation is too preservation oriented and needs to be more creative and focussed upon wilder and larger scale land management. Professor Chris Baines one of Britain's leading conservation experts described Taylor's book as important and brilliantly capturing the changing mood of conservation and Peter Marren gave it a whole page spread in the Independent. Alan Watson Featherstone, of Trees For Life endorsed the cover with 'this book offers a beacon of hope to all those who draw spiritual sustenance from wild Nature' and Professor Bill Adams, at Cambridge University, also endorsing the cover said 'Peter Taylor builds bridges between ecology, countryside policy and spirituality'. In networking ecological practitioners and land managers, Taylor worked to construct a political strategy for rewilding conservation through regional seminars, national conferences and in 2008, his colleague in the network Steve Carver founded the Wildland Research Institute at Leeds University.

Energy and climate change

In the lead up to his work on climate change, Taylor had been engaged at government level to develop strategies for the integration of renewable energy into countryside policy on community and biodiversity. Between 2000 and 2003, he was appointed to the UK National Advisory Group of the Community Renewables Initiative – a joint Countryside Agency and Department of Trade and Industry task-force on community scale renewable energy. To aid this work he set up the design consultancy Ethos, which combined science expertise from Terramarès with graphic design and the use of computer virtual reality for visualising change and integrating development in the countryside.

His controversial reassessment of global warming theory in 2009 outlined his concern that the remedies for climate change might prove more damaging to the environment than the ailment itself. Taylor argued that his work with the CRI had given him a deeper insight into the impacts associated with powering a modern economy from renewable sources. Despite an endorsement by the drafting author of the Kyoto Protocol – Professor Jackson Davis, with whom he worked at the UN and who had played a role in setting up the Framework Climate Convention, the book received little publicity at first – but in the lead up to the Copenhagen summit, his views were widely publicized. However, Taylor is critical of how the environmental movement and left-liberal press have ignored the book - it was not reviewed in The Guardian, The Independent, The Observer, nor in New Scientist, all of which had previously covered his work. He has become a target of ad hominem attacks focussed either on whether he is adequately qualified to review climate science or on his embrace of mystical philosophy and shamanism. His detractors have focussed upon his statements in Shiva's Rainbow of how science in public policy is mostly theatre and how he was more of an actor than a scientist. Taylor admits freely that most of his work was as a lawyer - 'the ultimate actor', but argues that his record as a skilled and experienced policy analyst has been glossed over by those who are averse to his message on climate change.

Yoga and healing work

In his autobiography, Taylor gives an account of studying with the yogic master Babaji, training with the founder of rebirthing Leonard Orr, and practising as a breathing therapist and teacher of meditation – in which he now has an international reputation, whilst at the same time being heavily involved in environmental activism. In recent years he has also trained with western shamanic practitioners and brings this perspective into his ecological conservation work and is often invited to speak at 'alternative' conventions where he has outlined his understanding of the connections between science and consciousness. Taylor featured in Karen Sawyer's The Dangerous Man as someone who challenges the fixed paradigms of science and social control.

He warns in his recent presentations and in his autobiography, that humanity faces a crisis of consciousness and that much of the enthusiasm and caring for the Earth especially among young people, is being channelled into collusion with undemocratic corporate power structures in the banking world. In this vein, he argues in Chill that mitigation of climate change is a delusion and that resources need to be channelled into adaptation and the creation of resilient human communities and a robust biodiversity.