“James Thornton is an environmental hero of the highest order. James’s extraordinary book Nature, My Teacher is captivating, mesmerising, and manages to capture so beautifully our true relationship with the natural world. This is a hugely important book.” – Ben Goldsmith, author of God is an Octopus
“James Thornton speaks as both a poet who has colonised science and a scientist who speaks a poetic tongue.” – E.O. Wilson
‘One of ten people who could change the world’ – The New Statesman
Born in Douglaston, New York, James’s life had taken him to South Bend, Indiana for the world’s first Earth Day. When schoolmates quit school to hit the streets in environmental protest, James stayed behind. He was desperate to save the natural world from ecological collapse, and study was somehow a part of it.
That study included poetry, the violin, French literature, philosophy (specializing in Kant and Wittgenstein), and entomology (the first attempts to breed tarantulas born in a household setting). And law. James has become one of the world’s leading environmental lawyers.
James’s first book for Barbican Press was his ecological thriller Sphinx: The Second Coming which spins the gods of Ancient Egypt into a multi-universe adventure (focused, of course, on saving planet Earth!). His legal thriller Immediate Harm tackled the issue of GM crops.
James Thornton is a poet, multi-faceted writer, Zen Buddhist priest, and founder and president of ClientEarth, the leading global not-for-profit law group. As a lawyer, with the Earth as his client, James sees Science as ‘the grammar of the Law’. The New Statesman named him one of 10 people who could change the world. Irish-American, born in New York, James is also the co-author of Client Earth (Scribe 2018), which received the Judges’ Selection, Business Book of the Year Award 2018, and the Green Prize for Sustainable Literature from Santa Monica Public Library. He has twice won Leader of the Year at the Business Green Awards. For his legal work, The Financial Times awarded him its Lifetime Achievement Award. His writing includes two novels, a book of spiritual practice, and three volumes of poetry. He was a judge for the 2020 Laurel Prize for Ecopoetry. He lives in London and Los Angeles.
James’s first collection of poems, The Feynman Challenge, was published in the USA in 2023. E.O.Wilson wrote of this collection: ‘In this unusual and exceptionally interesting work, James Thornton speaks as both a poet who has colonised science and a scientist who speaks a poetic tongue.’ James’s second collection Notes from a Mountain Village is composed of verses drawn from observations over twenty-five years of visiting his home in a French Pyrenean village. Waymarks tracks twenty-five years’ worth of James traversing the natural world, encountering people and natural wonders that helped shape him. His collection of essays, Nature is my Teacher, came out in 2024.
