Jim

Jim died this week, fittingly he was outdoors at the time. His death is a tremendous loss, not only to his family, but also to forestry and land conservation in Pennsylvania and his many friends. Jim was a friend of mine; we were, in many ways, like-minded when it came to forests, their management and people’s relationship to them and had conducted several workshops together.

Jim was Dr. James Finley – Professor of Forest Resources at Penn State, Founder and Director of Penn State’s Center for Private Forests, and senior research fellow at the Pinchot Institute for Conservation; he had been associated with Penn State for 42 years before retiring in 2017. Jim had been on the boards of a number of organizations: the Foundation for Sustainable Forests, the Western Pennsylvania Conservancy and the Center for Amazon Community Ecology.

Sustainable management of privately-owned woodland was the primary focus of his professional career and to that end he conducted research, authored publications, chaired committees, trained both landowners and professional foresters and managed the woodland that he and his family owned. The number of honors and awards he received are too numerous to list here, there were a lot.

It wasn't just forests and the trees within them that were of interest to Jim, he was a superb woodworker who specialized in lathe-turned objects especially bowls. Many of his beautiful pieces were donated to benefit conservation organizations.

All of us who knew Jim and considered him a friend will miss him greatly and Pennsylvania’s forests will be less well managed without his influence.