About James
James Card is an associate editor at Ducks Unlimited magazine, America's foremost publication about waterfowl and wetland conservation. Headquartered in Memphis, Tennessee, Ducks Unlimited is the world's largest non-profit organization dedicated to conserving North America's continually disappearing waterfowl habitats.
As a freelance journalist, James has written for Foreign Policy, the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Monocle, National Geographic News, Travel + Leisure, Salon, the Christian Science Monitor, Wired News, the Guardian Weekly, Field & Stream, Outside's Go, Yale Environment 360, ESPN, the Asia Sentinel, Asia Times, and other publications.
James lived in South Korea for twelve years working as a freelance journalist and fly fishing guide (click here to read "Life as Korea's Only Fly Fishing Guide" at Field & Stream). He relocated back to the United States in the autumn of 2009. While covering stories in Korea, he tracked the crimes of Korea's worst serial killer, visited the country's last leper colony, and interviewed a U.S. military team that recovers the remains of soldiers missing in action. He gained rare access to a remote part of the DMZ and reported on the ecological and political issues surrounding this militarized strip of land. Click here to listen to an interview with James about the Korean DMZ on Chicago Public Radio.
About environmental issues, he sailed on the Greenpeace ship the Rainbow Warrior to cover a whaling protest. He has reported on Korean dioxin levels and wind power developments; diminishing salmon migrations in the Sea of Japan, the construction of the world's largest sea wall on Korea's western coast, and the massive oil spill on the Taean peninsula. He's written about bowhunting whitetail deer for population control in an abandoned ammunition plant in Wisconsin and about fly fishing for non-native peacock bass and shotgunning nuisance crows in urban Singapore. James is a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists.
On the political and cultural front, he's reported on the streets at the APEC summit in Busan, analyzed Korea's failed Winter Olympic bids, and wrote about North Korea's nuclear ascendancy. He has dissected the passive-aggressive relations between Japan and South Korea, and has written about cloning dogs for dollars, killer robots on the DMZ, Korea's space tourist program, cyber diplomat spammers and Seoul's lost opportunity to create a desperately needed central park on a soon-to-be vacated US military base. He has written often on Korea's multi-billion dollar yet dysfunctional English education system.
He has also reviewed books by authors that range from Daewoo's former CEO to Jack London to an American defector in Pyeongyang. James has only written one video review. It was about unearthing an obscure gore film from North Korea that showcased caged animal fights. He also reviewed one of the hardest to find beers in the world, Taedong River, which is brewed in North Korea.
He originally hails from Wisconsin and he graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Platteville with a bachelor's of arts in 1995.
