James Kent was born and raised in the northern mountains of Appalachia on a farm near Panama, New York. He received his BA degree in Human Relations from Salem College in Salem, West Virginia. He received his MA degree in Sociology from Kent State University in 1962 and his Juris Doctor degree from the University of Denver in 1968. In 1969, having worked on establishing programs of the Great Society including Head Start, he and his long time associates from the war on poverty incorporated the Foundation for Urban and Neighborhood Development (FUND, Inc.). FUND is a social justice group that pioneered the original concepts of The Discovery Process, which is designed to empower people in their environments. To increase access to wider markets, he created the SRM Corp in l981 and James Kent Associates (JKA) in 1989. Under JKA the concept of a Human Geographic Issue Management System (HGIMS) was published. The Discovery Process and HGIMS have been combined to form a new company in 2000 called Natural Borders. He is widely published with his most recent work (with Kevin Preister), Social Ecology: A New Pathway to Watershed Restoration appearing in an ecosystem textbook called Principles and Practices of Watershed Restoration. He is involved as a creator and instructor of two courses Community Based Stewardship and Learning Communities: People, Place and Perspective at the Bureau of Land Management (BLM), National Training Center. He is currently involved with the re-creation of the BLM National Planning program for the 21st century. Kent lectures widely throughout the international community on the use of social ecology to form public policy. One of his most recognized efforts in this arena was working with many Philippine informal networks during the transition from the Marcos era to the democratic elected government of Corizon Aquino. His work in China during the late 1980's helped open up telecommunication opportunities for several American businesses. He has won several awards for his innovationsin public policy. His main hobby is to explore the "coffee shops" of the world where major changes have been incubated and networked into reality from the same gathering places over generations and centuries. Kent resides in Basalt, Colorado where he helped develop that community's Master Plan to include a section on the necessity to generate Social Capital as an essential part of its future growth.