Daniel C. Taylor

Daniel C. Taylor (born June 26, 1945) is an American scholar and practitioner of social change, with notable achievements in community-led conservation and global education. He also recognized as giving a definitive explanation for the century-old Yeti or Abominable Snowman) mysteries.

In the words of Wade Davis, Taylor’s method was shown around Mount Everest in “the creation of a nature preserve, not administered by distant bureaucrats but protected by the people who dwelt within its boundaries. It was a bold idea, so novel that at every meeting Daniel was able to increase the size” until trans-border protection resulted for the entire Mount Everest and central Himalayan region.

Taylor is President of Future Generations University Future Generations Graduate School which he founded. He has established twelve nonprofit organizations, ten still thrive, five are in the US. From 1993 to 2002, he was also a Senior Associate at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

He was knighted Suprabala-Gorkha-Dakshina-Bahu in Nepal in 1990, made the first Honorary Professor of Quantitative Ecology by the Chinese Academy of Sciences in 1995, and decorated with the Order of the Golden Ark by Prince Bernhard of the Netherlands in 2004.

Bill McKibben encapsulates his work, “The most interesting development expert I’ve ever met is a West Virginian named Daniel Taylor …. His mantra, based on a series of principles called SEED-SCALE, goes like this: Forget big plans. Development is not a product, not a target, not some happy future state … it’s a process, measured not in budgets but in how we invest our human energy.”

His theoretical work on social change, SEED-SCALE, mentioned above by McKibben, was launched by then UNICEF Executive Director James P. Grant, resulted in a first major publication in 1995, a second in 2002, a third in 2012.), and a fourth in 2016 The basic concept is that ‘seeds’ of human success exist in every community, even those considered destitute, and from these seeds fitted to local culture, resources, and ecology can be ‘scaled up’ grown both a rising quality of life and also extension out toward equitable improvement for all.

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