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James Thornton | |
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| Born | c.1954 New York, USA |
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| Spouse | Martin J. Goodman |
| Website | ClientEarth |
James Thornton is an environmental lawyer and writer. He was the founding CEO of ClientEarth, a global non-profit environmental law organisation before moving into the non-executive role of President and Founder. [1] Born in New York, he is also an Irish citizen. [2]
Thornton studied law at the New York University School of Law. [3]
Before heading for Europe, Thornton worked for Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), for whom he set up the citizens' enforcement project focusing on the Clean Water Act when the Reagan administration dropped its own enforcement. [4] He brought and won sixty cases in the federal courts in six months. [5] The enforcement project was funded by the McIntosh Foundation, led by Mike and Winsome McIntosh, who would later become the founding funders of ClientEarth. [6]
Thornton then moved to the NRDC office in San Francisco, from where he founded the LA Office of NRDC. He moved to LA to run it, staying at the Zen Center of Los Angeles.
Thornton founded ClientEarth in 2006. The International Bar Association has called ClientEarth “a public interest law firm, the first in the UK and continental Europe”. [7] Now with offices in London, Brussels, Warsaw, Berlin, New York and Beijing, and operating globally, it uses advocacy, litigation and research to address the greatest challenges of our time - including biodiversity loss, climate change, and toxic chemicals. Its work is built on solid law and science. ClientEarth's patrons are Coldplay, and Brian Eno is a trustee. In 2012 ClientEarth won Business Green's NGO of the Year [8] award. In 2013, it won the Law Society Gazette's Excellence in Environmental Responsibility Award. [9]
In 2011, ClientEarth's action [10] in the High Court forced the UK government to admit that it was breaching legal limits for air pollution. In 2012 ClientEarth's amicus curiae [11] (friends of the court) brief in the cases challenging the authority of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to regulate carbon pollution was the first time that European groups have entered a US environmental case this way. Thornton calls the Common Fisheries Policy 'the worst law in the world' [12] and is working with the Fish Fight campaign of TV chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall to make it workable. [13] He also works to enforce the Aarhus Convention, [14] working to give citizens access to courts in order to seek environmental justice.
Thornton appeared on stage with Brian Eno at the Luminous Festival, Sydney Opera House, in 2009 to discuss the environment. [15] He also featured in the BBC2 Arena documentary of Brian Eno. [16] At this time Thornton wrote for The Sydney Morning Herald [17] on why humanity needs a new renaissance.
In 2009 the New Statesman named Thornton as one of ten people who could change the world. [18] He was also called 'a new kind of environmental hero' by BBC Radio 4 [19] and Metropolitan magazine called him 'La force tranquille'. [20] In 2013 The Lawyer identified him as one of the Top 100 lawyers practising in the UK. [21] The Financial Times awarded him its Special Achievement Award at the 2016 Innovative Lawyer Awards.
Thornton is a member of the bars of New York, California, and the Supreme Court of the United States, and a Solicitor of England and Wales. [22] He is a Conservation Fellow of the Zoological Society of London [23] and a fellow of Ashoka, [24] the network of leaders in social innovations. His latest book, Client Earth is described by Nature as "a tantalizing glimpse of how a variety of strategies can converge to create a global environmental enforcement effort."
Thornton is a Zen Buddhist. [3] He did a retreat with the Indian teacher Mother Meera in Germany for 14 months, after which he started Positive Futures, an organization to teach meditation to environmental activists. [25] For some years he was executive director of the Heffter Research Institute, which worked on the medical application of hallucinogens [26] among other neuroscience developments. For Theodore Roszak he wrote one of the founding documents for the ecopsychology movement, an early precursor of Wild Law. [27] He was ordained a priest in the Soto Zen order at the Zen Center of Los Angeles in April 2009, by Roshi Wendy Egyoku Nakao. [28] Attraction to study with the Japanese Zen Master Taizan Maezumi Roshi, was a reason why Thornton moved to San Francisco in 2009.
Thornton wrote A Field Guide to the Soul, [29] a guide to spiritual practice. He also co-authored a major study of company reporting law 'Environmental and social transparency under the Companies Act 2006: Digging Deeper' [30] and his first novel Immediate Harm [31] was published in 2011, and his second novel Sphinx the Second Coming [32] came out in 2014.
Thornton is a frequent blogger on the Huffington Post . [33] He co-wrote Client Earth: Building an Ecological Civilization with his husband Martin J. Goodman. It won Judges' Choice in the Business Book Awards 2018. [34] His debut poetry collection The Feynman Challenge, which takes up a challenge by the physicist Richard Feynman that poets should tackle the realities of science, came out from Barbican Press in the UK in 2017. E.O. Wilson says of it: 'In this unusual and exceptionally interesting work, James Thornton speaks as both a poet who has colonized science and a scientist who speaks a poetic tongue.' [35]
Thornton is a keen ornithologist. [3]
The Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) is a United States–based 501(c)(3) non-profit international environmental advocacy group, with its headquarters in New York City and offices in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Bozeman, India, and Beijing. The group was founded in 1970 in opposition to a hydroelectric power plant in New York.
Denis Allen Hayes is an environmental advocate and an advocate for solar power. He rose to prominence in 1970 as the coordinator for the first Earth Day.
United States environmental law concerns legal standards to protect human health and improve the natural environment of the United States.
Ecopsychology is an interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary field that focuses on the synthesis of ecology and psychology and the promotion of sustainability. It is distinguished from conventional psychology as it focuses on studying the emotional bond between humans and the Earth. Instead of examining personal pain solely in the context of individual or family pathology, it is analyzed in its wider connection to the more than human world. A central premise is that while the mind is shaped by the modern world, its underlying structure was created in a natural non-human environment. Ecopsychology seeks to expand and remedy the emotional connection between humans and nature, treating people psychologically by bringing them spiritually closer to nature.
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Martin J. Goodman is an English journalist and writer.
Council of Republicans for Environmental Advocacy (CREA) was a Republican environmental organization founded in 1998 by Gale Norton, who in 2001 became George W. Bush's U.S. Secretary of the Interior. CREA "evolved from a group" Italia Federici and Norton founded in 1997 "with tax activist Grover Norquist to push for Republican environmental goals." The organization's steering committee included lobbyists for the petroleum, mining, and auto manufacturing industries. The organization's president, Italia Federici, pleaded guilty in 2007 to obstructing the U.S. Senate investigation into the Jack Abramoff Indian lobbying scandal and for siphoning CREA funds for personal use. Abramoff donated more than $400,000 to her charity, after which time she began using her connections with J. Steven Griles, to influence him to make decisions beneficial to Abramoff's tribal benefactors. Later in 2007, CREA's vice president, Jared Carpenter, pleaded guilty of tax evasion for also diverting CREA funds for personal use.
Pinsent Masons LLP is a multinational law firm which specialises in the energy, infrastructure, financial services, real estate and technology, science & industry sectors. The firm ranks among the top hundred law firms in the world by turnover.
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Kohn, Kohn & Colapinto is a Washington, D.C.-based international whistleblower rights law firm specializing in anti-corruption and whistleblower law, representing whistleblowers who seek rewards, or who are facing employer retaliation, for reporting violations of the False Claims Act, Foreign Corrupt Practices Act, Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform, Sarbanes-Oxley Acts, Commodity and Security Exchange Acts and the IRS Whistleblower law.
The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA) is an international NGO founded in 1984 in the United Kingdom by environmental activists Dave Currey, Jennifer Lonsdale and Allan Thornton. At present, it has offices in London and Washington, D.C. The EIA covertly investigates and campaigns against environmental crime and abuse.
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ClientEarth is an environmental law charity, with offices in London, Brussels, Warsaw, Berlin, Beijing, Madrid and Los Angeles. It was founded in 2008 by James Thornton and the organisation's CEO is Laura Clarke. As lawyers and environmental experts, they use the law to hold governments and other companies to account over climate change, nature loss, and pollution.
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