Michael K. Dorsey

Michael Dorsey is a member of Dartmouth College's Faculty of Science (Hanover, New Hampshire) and teaches in the Environmental Studies Program. Dorsey is a graduate of the University of Michigan School of Natural Resources and Environment; Yale University's School of Forestry and Environmental Studies and the Department of Anthropology at Johns Hopkins University.

Prior to joining Dartmouth's faculty, he held the Thurgood Marshall Fellowship in Environmental Studies and Geography at Dartmouth College from September 2001 to January 2002.

Dorsey's work covers a wide variety of international and domestic environmental policy concerns. In 1996 he began researching the political-economy of biodiversity conservation and management, as well as the development and deployment of biotechnologies. His research also concerns the interplay of environmental regulations and transnational corporations. He teaches courses on the aforementioned areas as well as on the topic of environmental justice and ethics.

Dorsey was the youngest NGO representative on the US State Department Delegation to the United Nations Conference on Environment and Development (UNCED or the Earth Summit) in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Following the Earth Summit in 1993, he was a lecturer in the University of Michigan's College of Literature Science and the Arts, where he taught the seminar: Environmental Justice: Issues of Race, Poverty and the Environment.

Later that year Michael was a visiting scholar at the World Resources Institute (WRI). After a short stint with WRI he continued to Africa, per the direct request of Calestous Juma (former Secretary General of the UN Convention on Biological Diversity), where he served as a Research Fellow with the African Centre for Technology Studies (ACTS), under then Executive Director Juma, in Nairobi, Kenya. At ACTS, Dorsey conducted research on the environmental consequences of World Bank-sponsored economic policy reforms.

Dorsey also worked closely with Friends of the Earth (FOE) Ecuador (Acción Ecológica) on a variety of extractive industry (i.e., oil, mining, and bioprospecting) and human rights issues. He was the co-principal investigator on their biopiracy campaign that focused on the five countries of the Andean Pact.

Dorsey is also a founding member of several organizations. Internationally, between 1991-92 he worked with an international steering committee to start Action for Solidarity Environment and Development (ASEED (http://www.aseed.net/)) now based in the Netherlands. He is a founding member of the San Francisco-based Center for Environmental Health (http://www.cehca.org). Currently he is working to develop and staff the Environmental Leadership Program (www.elpnet.org/office). He also sits on the boards of the US based Sierra Club (www.sierraclub.org) and CorpWatch (www.corpwatch.org).

Dorsey was a delegate to the US First National People of Color Environmental Leadership Summit in 1991 he worked to build and maintain the Northeast Network for Environmental and Economic Justice. As an early member of the US based Student Environmental Action Coalition (SEAC) Dorsey worked on a wide-range of environmental campaigns--from recycling drives to building solar cars to raising awareness about the adverse environmental impacts of the multilateral aid agencies--on many campuses across the US, some of which include: the University of Michigan, Yale University, the University of Colorado, Wesleyan, the University of Dayton, Brandeis University and Bunker Hill Community College.

Dorsey lectures on a variety of matters, especially in the realm of international environment and development, as well as social justice concerns.

In fall of 2001 Dorsey was a visiting lecturer at the University of Groningen (The Netherlands) and co-proctored a multi-day short course on the nature of international negotiations since UNCED in the Department of Regional Planning at Royal Institute of Technology in Stockholm, Sweden.

Dorsey also serves as Special Senior Advisor on International Affairs and Policy at the Center for Genetics and Society, representing and lobbying for the interests of a consortium of NGOs seeking a global ban on human cloning. During the Clinton Administration, Michael served as a Task Force member on President's Council on Sustainable Development.

In 1992, Dorsey's efforts to promote and foster widespread social, economic and environmental change were captured in the television documentary: Green for Life. In addition to Dorsey the documentary profiled the work and lives of some of his close colleagues: Joliet Majot, co-founder of the International Rivers Network in California and the late David Brower, a former Sierra Club Board Member and Founder of Friends of the Earth.

In 1997, in Glasgow, Scotland, Dorsey was the recipient of Rotary International’s highest honor, the Paul Harris Medal, for Distinguished Service to Humanity. In 2000 he was nominated for the Ford Foundation's Leadership for a Changing World Award.