Jayson Maurice Porter

Jayson Maurice Porter was born in Maryland like his great-grandmother Winona Spencer Lee (1909-2012), who worked family farm land on the Eastern Shore until the early 2000s. He is an environmental writer and historian who researches environmental histories of Mexico, the African Diaspora, food systems, agrochemicals, and environmental justice and injustice. You can find his writing in The Washington Post, Environmental Humanities, Distillations Magazine, Environment and Society, and more. He is currently working on a book manuscript with Duke University Press on the environmental history of the African Diaspora, violence, and environmental change in Guerrero, Mexico through oilseeds crops, such as cotton, sesame, and coconuts.

As an environmental educator, Jayson's teaching specialties extend to environmental justice history, science and technologies studies of race and resistance, and Afro-Indigenous ecologies in Latin America and the tropics more broadly. He is an editorial board member of the North American Congress for Latin America (NACLA) and Plant Perspectives: An Interdisciplinary Journal. He also serves as a Black and Indigenous Climate Faculty Fellow in the Indigenous Futures Lab of the Harriet Tubman Department of Women, Gender, and Sexuality Studies; is a board member of Rutgers University’s Black Ecologies Lab; and is a co-designer of the Chicago Teachers Union’s Environmental Justice Freedom School. Jayson is also the principal curator and director of the CEDAR Gallery. 

Academic Articles

Cotton, Whiteness, and Other Poisons in Environmental Humanities 14 (2022) with geographer Brian Williams (Won Best Article Prize of 2023)
"Black Placemaking under Environmental Stressors" in Environment and Society 13 (2022) with biologist Maya L. Shamsid-Deen 
"Plagas, pesticidas, y ciencias agrícolas entre revoluciones," Boletín (FAPECFT) 89 (2018)

Public-facing essays

Mule Power in Distillations Magazine (2025)
Sesame Plots in Distillations Magazine (2025)
Proxies for Justice in Distillations Magazine (2024) with paleoclimatologist Lina Ángel-Pérez 
Rings of Fire in Distillations Magazine (2024)