Our Monthly Meeting will include a Conservation and Photography Lecture with Former Executive Director of the D&R Canal Commission. Jim has been able to spend nearly all of his working life addressing environmental issues, despite having advanced college degrees in history and philosophy.  In 1974 the State of New Jersey established the Delaware and Raritan Canal as a State Park and Jim was hired by the overseeing commission to be in charge of actually making the abandoned waterway a park.   Thirty years later, he was still working as the Executive Director of the D&R Canal Commission, the Canal Park had 70 miles of usable paths, it was almost doubled in size, twelve communities along its banks had been entered onto the National Register Historic Districts, and the Canal Commission had a regulatory program to protect the Canal Park that was precedent-breaking and widely emulated.  

Jim retired in 2005 and became Director of Stewardship for the D&R Greenway Land Trust, a non-profit that he helped start in 1989.  For the next ten years Jim assisted in ecological restoration work on the nearly 100 nature preserves owned by the Greenway.  When he retired from that job he started writing a monthly series of essays, accompanied by my photographs, on the plants, animals and natural processes of New Jersey’s Sourland region—the largest intact woodland in central New Jersey.  In 2019, 64 of those essays and over 100 of the photographs were published as a book entitled SEEING THE SOURLANDS.