These days Blair Taylor looks the part of an academic.

VNEC sweater, collared shirt, but a couple decades ago, he came across very differently.

I was a young dreadlocked earth first activist in the Pacific Northwest that had been, you know, doing like road blockades to stop logging.

He took part in chaotic protests against the World Trade Organization in 1999, known as the Battle of Seattle.

I was locked down to a tripod in the middle of downtown Seattle.

Let them go! Let them go! Let them go!

It's basically just like three poles, kind of like imagine the frame of like a teepee or a tent or something.

And you put a person up on the top and the idea is that if they try to move it, the person's gonna fall and get hurt or killed.

So you're putting yourself in the way, you know, it was a common earth first tactic to stop destruction of forests and other natural areas.

So we adapted it to like an urban environment.

The whole world is watching! The whole world is watching!

Marshal Law was declared, you know, we all got pepper sprayed many times, shot with rubber bullets.

Downtown Seattle was just covered in thick plumes of tear gas and smoke.

It was a pretty wild, wild time.

Back then, Taylor started to read some of the early writings by founders of the environmental movement for more than a century ago.

To figure out where this philosophy he was so committed to got its start and what he found shook him.

There is this earlier, very nativist exclusionary and racist history of environmental thought.

It was very much based on this idea of nature as a violent, competitive and ultimately very hierarchical domain where, you know, white Europeans were at the top.

The movement he had risked his life for had an insidious racist history.

One that equated preserving the natural world with protecting the white race.

And so, Blair Taylor pivoted.

Today, he's program director for the Institute for Social Ecology.

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