04/08/2026
When James McCommons ’93 came to ESF, he was a mid‑career journalist looking for a graduate degree to expand his options and bring more expertise to his writing. Upon entering the master’s program in Environmental Science, he immersed himself in statistics, ecology, and economics, and found that ESF served as a powerful catalyst for his storytelling. “A few story ideas came directly from my classes at ESF,” he recalls, including fieldwork helping an ESF Ph.D. student radio‑collar moose in Algonquin Provincial Park. “It was great fun.”
James wrote his ESF thesis, “A Landowner’s Guide to Managing Private Wetlands”, under Professor Richard Smardon and collaborated with Professor Robert Hennigan on an Environmental Impact Statement for Onondaga Lake. He still values the coursework he completed with Hennigan, Charles Hall, Guy Baldassarre, and Robert Werner, calling the experience foundational to both his writing and teaching career.
Through a past ESF–SU agreement, James also earned a master's degree at Syracuse University. For his final project, he placed two stories on wetland management in national magazines and wrote a thesis on environmental reporting. After graduating, he worked as a writer and editor at Rodale Press, specifically “Organic Gardening”, while also teaching journalism and essay writing at Muhlenberg College and DeSales University in Pennsylvania. He later moved to the Upper Peninsula of Michigan, where he accepted a full-time position at Northern Michigan University and became a tenured professor in the English Department, teaching print journalism, advising the student newspaper, and teaching nature writing to graduate students.
Today, he lives in Marquette, Michigan (wintering in Alpine, Texas), where he continues to write and explore. His third book of nonfiction, “The Feather Wars” published by St. Martin's Press, was released on March 17 and is available in the ESF College Bookstore.
