James G. Blaine is a journalist, teacher and consultant, whose work has focused primarily on environmental, urban and social issues. He currently works with the Stroud Water Research Center, a non-profit organization dedicated to research and education on steams and rivers. He was also editor of passopenrecords.org, a blog sponsored by the Pennsylvania Newspaper Association, to bring open-records reform to the state, and he received the PNA’s Benjamin Franklin Award for Excellence for his work. Earlier, he founded and published The Kennett Paper, which was named Pennsylvania’s weekly Newspaper of the Year in 1997, 1998 & 1999; and he subsequently published eight weeklies in southeastern Pa. He has taught at a variety of levels, including teaching severely autistic adolescents and starting an inner-city after-school program. He has worked with urban revitalization groups nationally, run a regional environmental/ community development organization, and managed a cattle farm in South America. He holds a BA from Harvard College and an MA and Ph.D. from the University of Michigan.

Courses Taught

• ENVS 628 Science, Policy & Management of Rivers and their Watersheds.
  When governments oversee environmental quality at the federal, state and local level, their regulatory authority terminates at the geographic boundary. However, nature seldom recognizes those arbitrary boundaries unless they coincide with a natural one. For both analytical and planning purposes, the watershed has become the logical unit for environmental investigation. In this course, we will introduce the science of rivers and their watersheds - topography, hydrology, ecology and biogeochemistry. We will then discuss policy that governs freshwater in the United States and elsewhere. Finally, we will evaluate current best-management practices designed to improve and maintain water quality and quantity. During these discussions, we will view competing interests, such as whether upstream needs should take precedence over downstream demands, and when the rights of individual landowners should give way to the interests of others dependent on freshwater resources.

• ENVS 652 God, Gold & Green: Themes and Classics in American Environmental Thought
  Through an exploration of enduring themes and classics, this course traces environmental thought in America from the first European settlements to the present. We begin by considering the preconceptions that Europeans brought to the New World and the realities they found when they arrived. We look at the issues raised by the unprecedented industrial and urban expansion of the 19th century and the accompanying westward migration that filled the continent. We examine how the conflict between economic growth and environmental limits created competing models of prosperity, equality and justice. And finally, we look at ways to transcend those divides and build a sustainable and equitable future. The primary vehicles for understanding the evolution of environmental thinking across several centuries are some of the classic texts of environmental thought – from The Book of Genesis to Henry Thoreau’s Walden to Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring to Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth. The course seeks to provide a theoretical and historical framework that will help students understand current issues and address real problems.