More than you wanted to know
about me

Below are some (historical) highlights about me and acknowledgments of some folks who have given me opportunities to do what I love to do.

I started off as a budding wildlife biologist banding Common Snipe back in 1967 at Texas A&M University with Keith Arnold. I got roped into a small mammal project (live trapping cotton rats) by Bob Fleet. Bob also got me involved as one of three organizers of Earth Day in 1970 at TAMU. Unfortunately, the administration took a dim view of our activisim and I received an offer to join Uncle Sam's canoe club in the Philippines that I couldn't refuse. When I returned four years later, Bob enticed me to work on the ecology of cockroaches for Gordon Frankie. (He was not able to presuade me to join the rugby team though.)

Even though I had switched my allegiance from wildlife science to geography (thank you Campbell Pennington and Clarrisa Kimber), Gordon took me to Costa Rica to work on bees and pollination systems. While there, I teamed up with Kamal Bawa to help on his research project studying breeding systems of lowland trees at La Selva Costa Rica. I was the La Selva station manager in 1976-77....back when it was a REAL research station.

After settling down in Santa Barbara, California in 1978 and wondering how I was ever going to afford graduate school, I ended up doing more field work. This time with Bob Warner studying blue head wrasse in the San Blas Islands (Kuna Yala) of Panama. This project led to work back at UCSB with John Chapman, and then Sally Holbrook and Russ Schmidt. And, I did a little computer work for Bill Murdoch and Joe Connell's Marine Review Committee.

In 1986, I returned to Costa Rica to work on a canopy mapping project with Nalini Nadkarni. And then I took a new direction in my professional life. The Monteverde Conservation League needed an interim executive director for about three months. Three months turned into three years. During that time, I oversaw the creation of the Children's Eternal Rainforest and the purchase of 64,000 acres of rainforest for conservation.

In 1991, I returned to Texas to readjust to stateside living once again and to get an MBA. I managed to live about a block from the international bridge in Laredo, Texas...so it wasn't too much of a shock being back in the USA. Plus, family that I had seen way too infrequently were only 50 miles up the road.

Next, while working as director of the Texas Center for Border Economic and Enterprise Development, Kamal Bawa invited me to finally do the work necessary to get a PhD specializing in conservation biology at UMass Boston. While at UMass Boston, I cooked up the idea of EcoShares in 1998. EcoShares is a way to commoditize ecosystem services, reduce transaction costs and make them fungible.

Due to one thing and another, I bailed out of school unfinished. And, not using my MBA in international banking, I worked as a unix computer systems administrator for State Street Bank in downtown Boston. Three years of the high finance jungle was enough to make me want to head back to the more friendly tropical jungles.

And yet, my heart was in New England as I had successfully wooed and married my true love in 1998. Fortunately Brandeis University offered me a position as department adminstrator of their Chemistry Department---thanks to Colin Steel and Peter Jordan for making that happen. It was great to be back in an academic research setting even though I was not doing research and my last chemistry course had been in the late 1960s. It was a chance for me to catch my breath and decide to pick up my EcoShares idea once again.

Just when I was inclined to forget about doing conservation work again, Leigh Youngblood of Mount Grace Land Conservation Trust gave me a short contract position working on the Forest Legacy project. That is where I'm at today with a month left to get things wrapped up....and decide what I will do next...

Cheers,

Jim