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Growing up in Columbus, Ohio, Dudley Edmondson says he found solace in the outdoors. Green spaces provided an escape from city life and the tension in his household. He didn’t have to worry about social norms or how he was being perceived by others—in nature, he was free.
Edmondson says that for people of color, this sense of true freedom can only be found in wilderness spaces. “When you’re sitting on a bench in a Starbucks, or in your work cubicle, or walking down a busy city street, you have to be a certain way because society demands it,” he says. “When you’re in the wilderness, none of that applies. You can be whoever you want to be. … The fish in the creek don’t care what color you are, they’re not going to call the cops on you.”
Despite this, Edmondson still felt like an outlier. “I didn’t know anybody like me when I was growing up in my neighborhood. None of the adults or kids were connected to nature. … At one time, I felt I was the only Black person who enjoyed nature and the outdoors,” he says. “Spending my childhood and early adulthood not knowing that there were people like me out there, I finally decided I wanted to go and find some of these people.”
Now based in Duluth, the birder, photographer, public speaker, and author spent four years conducting interviews across the country for his book “Black & Brown Faces in America’s Wild Places.” The book profiles African Americans with nontraditional outdoor vocations and hobbies to create a set of “outdoor role models” for the Black community.
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“Scientists of color can inspire young college and high school students. Conservationists of color can make people more concerned about their communities and the green spaces in and around them,” he says. “I felt like if I put a set of outdoor role models in front of the nation’s African American community, then maybe the message of connecting to nature and conservation might transfer across from the folks in the book to the folks reading the book.”
Edmondson has gone to great heights through his work in natural conservation. He was at the White House for the signing of America’s Great Outdoors Initiative in 2010, and in 2021, he was appointed by the Minnesota House of Representatives to the Lessard-Sams Outdoor Heritage Council to help protect and restore Minnesota’s prairie, wetlands, and forest habitats.
Much of his work focuses on making the conservation sector more diverse and inclusive, because, as he says, leaving people of color out of this narrative is negatively impacting the environment.
“The only reason conservation is necessary is because colonizers, European settlers, destroyed this nation’s natural environment, not unlike what they did in their homelands. So having the people who make conservation necessary be the only people who are practicing conservation just doesn’t make sense to me,” Edmondson says. “You can’t be the destroyer of the environment and the savior of the environment all at the same time.”
The racial disparities within environmental conservation are prevalent. A 2021 report by Green 2.0, an independent campaign that collects data on racial and ethnic diversity within the environmental movement, examined demographic data from 67 non-governmental organizations (NGOs) and 20 grantmaking foundations. The report found that NGOs are “still overwhelmingly white-led,” with only 25.3% of participating organizations headed by people of color. It also found that in 2021, participating foundations funded white-led organizations at nearly double the rate of those led by people of color.
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For a more diverse range of perspectives, Edmondson suggests asking people who have historical knowledge about the natural environment.
“There’s a lot of place-based knowledge from Indigenous communities and the history of enslaved Africans who also spent a lot of time on the land. None of that is ever really considered to be useful when coming up with conservation practices,” he says. “When white Americans don’t really have that perspective … I don’t think they can completely make the best decisions for restoration and preservation.”
Edmondson suggests that white-led conservation organizations could report to an Indigenous oversight committee that “knows what is truly necessary to bring the environment back,” he says. “If you’ve got a diverse think tank of people, you’re gonna probably come up with better solutions.”
But Edmondson says that in general, he has noticed more people of color getting involved in the outdoors in the last three to five years. He credits this to a wave of grassroots organizations and groups like Outdoor Afro, Color the Crag, Black Birders Week, and others that are focused on getting people of color involved in outdoor activities.
As a result, Edmondson says his experience outdoors today is different than what it was 40 years ago. “I’ve never been happier to see something change,” Edmondson says. “I knew that there were people out there. I just needed to find them.”
Edmondson was recently featured in the PBS series “America Outdoors with
Baratunde Thurston.” The program also asked Minnesotans David and Lise Abazs and Dave and Amy Freeman about their conservations efforts and outdoors activism. Read more about both couples here.
