Jim Blackburn is an environmental lawyer, the CEO of BCarbon (a non-profit carbon credit registry) and a professor in the practice in the Civil and Environmental Engineering Department at Rice University.  Blackburn teaches sustainable design and is co-director of the Severe Storm (SSPEED) Center at Rice and is a faculty scholar at the Baker Institute where BCarbon was formed out of a stakeholder working group that now numbers over 800 individuals.  Blackburn has published two books about the Texas coast through Texas A&M Press (The Book of Texas Bays 2004 and A Texan Plan for the Texas Coast in 2017) as well as two collections of poems with artist Isabelle Scurry Chapman (Birds: A Book of Verse and Vision and Hill Country Birds and Waters: Art and Poems). They also collaborated on Earth Church, a book about spirituality and the Earth.  Among other honors, Blackburn was designated as a Rice alumni laureate in 2018.