James Thornton is a poet, 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 that 'Nature speaks in the grammar of science’. He is a Conservation Fellow of the Royal Zoological Society. The New Statesman named him one of 10 people who could change the world. Irish-American, born in New York, James is also the author of Client Earth (Scribe 2018), co-authored with his husband Martin Goodman, 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 Awards for Ecopoetry. He lives in London and Los Angeles.

"Powerful and moving. Make this book your friend. It gives wise and insightful counsel, and is bursting with love for the natural world. I will be returning often to its pages." - Arianna Huffington, Founder & CEO, Thrive Global"A profound guide to discovering the great wisdom in the natural world, this book by James Thornton is a treasure for all." - Roshi Joan Halifax, Abbot, Upaya Zen Center"James Thornton is an environmental hero of the highest order. James’s extraordinary book Nature, My Teacher is captivating, mesmerising, and manages to capture so beautifully our true relationship with the natural world. This is a hugely important book." - Ben Goldsmith, author of God is an Octopus"This marvellous, poetic collection of insights is full of humility, wisdom and wonder. Some are satirical, some joyous, some uncomfortably challenging and some just plain sad. But weaving through all of them is Thornton’s irrepressible faith in humankind. “Help me do something about it”, he says, when writing about the dwindling of the natural world. And then he offers a beautiful roadmap for how we can find the resources inside ourselves to do just that. Unmissable." - Gabrielle Walker, author of Antarctica"This is a beautiful, important and uplifting book. In it James Thornton lays out his love for the planet in a way that is thought-provoking and lyrical, a spacious blend of prose and poetry flavoured with the subtleties of the author’s Zen training. I came away inspired by the wisdom I had encountered in these pages and by the unmistakable aftertaste of compassion." - Antony Osler, author of Stoep Zen

• Introduction15The Book of Nature16The Book of Self and Other44The Book of Memory62The Book of Questions80The Book of Mind98The Book of Millions of Years114The Book of Compassion Arising128The Book of the Warming Earth144The Book of Anxiety160The Book of Unapologetic Rest184The Book of Simple Wants196The Book of Things I Need to Remember210Endnotes229Acknowledgments231