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.

bio from Barbican Press

From the Feynman Challenge

From Nature Is My Teacher