Biography

James Thornton has been an environmental lawyer for many years. He started the Los Angeles Office of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The office is a consistent source of nationally and internationally important environmental legal work; Thornton’s work on protecting California coastal habitat has been cited by Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt as the model for complex multi-species protection plans. He is currently practising environmental law in England and working to increase access to justice in environmental cases in line with the Aarhus Convention.

Thornton is a certified Zen teacher in the Soto lineage of Taizan Maezumi Roshi, with whom he trained for ten years at the Los Angeles Zen Center. He is also authorized to teach in the Hindu tradition. His teachers Maezumi Roshi, the Dalai Lama and Mother Meera have all asked him to create and teach a form of practice that unites people with the Earth.

He graduated from Yale University phi beta kappa, magna cum laude, with honors in philosophy, and from New York University School of Law, where he was Editor in Chief of the Law Review. He clerked for Judge John Minor Wisdom of the United States Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, and was an attorney with the New York Firm of Paul, Weiss, Rikfind, Wharton & Garrison before becoming a senior attorney at the Natural Resources Defense Council.

He served as Professor of Law (adjunct) at New York University School of Law, and at The City University of New York School of Law.

He is the author of numerous articles. His book, A Field Guide to the Soul: A Down to Earth Handbook of Spiritual Practice, was published by Random House/Bell Tower in February 1999, and the paperback edition appeared in March 2000.

He has homes in Santa Fe, New Mexico; the French Pyrenees; and Bedfordshire, England.