James R. Remuzzi

James R. Remuzzi is the president of Nature Works, a professional land management company with offices in Shepherdstown, WV and Morgantown, WV. James founded Nature Works after founding and running Sustainable Solutions, LLC a natural resource management company for 20 years providing natural resource consulting and management services to private landowners, forestry associations, conservation buyers, non profits, NGO’s, investors, and State and Federal agencies. Nature Works continues this legacy by providing specialized and professional land management services while also investing in workforce development.

James grew up on a farm in Clarks Gap, Virginia that raised grass fed beef and timber and as a child was most happy in the woods and fields. He has degrees in Forest Technology and Environmental Science from the University of New Hampshire. Prior to founding Sustainable Solutions, his experience was based largely in the private sector, where he worked as a member of the planning team for the Chesapeake Forests Project, and then as a Forestry Tech for the project responsible for inventorying, monitoring, and prescribed fire on over 60,000 acres of forestland on Maryland and Virginia’s Eastern Shore. While on the Shore, James was a member of the management team that underwent a successful dual SFI/FSC forest certification audit of 25,000 acres of the Chesapeake Forest project lands.

James is a West Virginia Licensed professional forester and an expert in ecosystem services and their markets and conservation technology. In collaboration with the Pinchot Institute for Conservation, he was the architect and lead developer of the Bay Bank, an ecosystem marketplace for the Chesapeake Bay and LandServer, an innovative first of it’s kind mapping tool. James was also a member of the development team for the Texas Coastal Exchange.

An accomplished public speaker, James has presented on Ecosystem Services and their markets, Sustainable Forestry, and Prescribed Fire at over 100 conferences on ecosystems services across the United States, and is a guest lecturer at University of Maryland and New York University.

James has extensive training and certifications through the National Wildfire Coordinating Group (NWCG), and is a certified burn manager in Maryland, Virginia, and Georgia. He is passionate about prescribed fire and has served as a Burn Boss on over 8000 acres of prescribed fire in a variety of fuel types across six states and on private, state, county, non profit, and federal lands.

In 2007, James was selected as a Kinship Conservation Fellow and served on the Kinship advisory board for two years. In 2024, James was selected by the Goldman Sachs 10,000 Small Businesses program to be in the first GS10ksb cohort in West Virginia

James currently leads the Nature Works team to provide sustainable forestry, invasive plant control, native meadow and grassland management, prescribed fire planning, permitting, and implementation, and hazardous fuel reduction for Private, County, State, Federal, and Non Profit clients across the Mid and North Atlantic.

He is an accomplished outdoorsman who has spent 25+ years hiking, biking, running canyoneering, skiing, snowboarding, climbing, and paddling across a variety of countries, states, and ecosystems. In 2000, he was a member of a self guided team that summited Denali via the Washburn route. He lives in Shenandoah Junction WV in a farmhouse built in 1840 with his wife, two daughters, 7 goats, 4 chickens, and a cattle dog named Roo.