<AboutSN>

Mission

Second Nature’s mission is to accelerate movement toward a sustainable future by serving and supporting senior college and university leaders in making healthy, just, and sustainable living the foundation of all learning and practice in higher education.

Too often, we view health, social, economic, security, environmental, and other major societal issues as separate, competing, and hierarchical, when they are really systemic and interdependent. We do not have environmental problems per se - we have negative environmental consequences of the way we have designed our business, social, economic, and political systems. The challenge of addressing these flaws in societal design is unprecedented, daunting, and exciting. It is one that will require the best in all of us, especially in higher education.

We believe that in order for society to move in a sustainable direction, higher education must develop a new framework in which the sector and individual institutions operate as a fully integrated communities that teach, research, and model social and ecological sustainability.

Since 1993, Second Nature has worked with over 4,000 faculty and administrators at more than 500 colleges and universities to help make the principles of sustainability fundamental to every aspect of higher education. Our successes include advancing Education for Sustainability (EFS) networks at the state, regional, and national levels; and conducting a multi-million dollar, ten-year advocacy and outreach effort that was instrumental in launching the higher education EFS movement.

Today, as senior leaders in higher education (presidents, chancellors, provosts, chief financial officers, trustees, etc.) adopt the values of sustainability, Second Nature is well-positioned to build their capacity to rapidly translate these values into action.

Second Nature is a Commonwealth of Massachusetts nonprofit public benefit corporation, and a tax-exempt charitable organization as described in section 501(c)(3) of the United States Internal Revenue Code.

Vision & Philosophy

We imagine a just and sustainable future.

We envision a world where all members of humankind are healthy, live in socially vibrant and culturally diverse communities have personal and economic security, fully participate in governance of society and our life support system is biologically diverse and sustainable.

We work to promote a learning environment that provides the awareness, knowledge, skills and values to achieve this vision, a future where current and future generations achieve good health, economic security, social fairness and stability while restoring and sustaining the Earth's life support systems.

Our work toward this vision embraces interdisciplinary learning and includes the community as a whole. By reinforcing the concept that the educational experience of all students must be aligned with the principles of sustainability, we help ensure that the content of learning embraces interdisciplinary systems thinking to address environmentally sustainable action on local, regional and global scales over short-, medium- and inter-generational time periods. Through this way of learning, education comes to have the same "lateral rigor" across the disciplines as it has "vertical rigor" within the disciplines.

Second Nature works to overcome the inherent limits of compartmentalized knowledge without connection to larger system interactions, by demonstrating the interdependencies and interconnections among seemingly separate and competing social challenges -- such as population, consumption, economic, health, social justice, personal and national security, and the environment. Without such interdisciplinary systemic thinking, the net results to solve these problems are often narrow, ineffective solutions, or worse, actually increase the harm to people and the environment in another place or another time. Systems thinking is essential to developing a shared framework for understanding and dealing with complex, nonlinear systems that are characteristic of both society and the natural world.

Through the past fifteen years of pioneering work, SN has been a primary force behind this holistic and transformative way of approaching education. We have provided some of the first methods for thinking of the university as a fully integrated community. Our most stalwart concept, the one that we hold forth for future leaders in the Education for Sustainability movement, is that the entire education experience must change behavior. Simply "solving" the problems we currently face is not the answer: we must redirect our work and ourselves to eliminate the problems in the first place as we make progress in meeting the health, social and economic needs of current and future generations. In other words, sustainability is not simply how we "fix" things, it is how we design and make those things in the first place so that they exist harmoniously in an ecological, cultural and moral context. Pollution is a classic example: our challenge is not to figure out how to clean up pollution but to learn how to design our products, services, and activities that improve and sustain the environment and enhance health and well-being. Through this approach, we can achieve a healthy, just and environmentally sustainable world.

We continually hold to our touchstone: in shaping education for the twenty-first century, we need a new framework for learning in which higher education would operate as a fully integrated community that models social and biological sustainability itself and in its interdependence with the local, regional and global community.

History

Second Nature was founded in Boston in 1993 by a small group of forward-thinking leaders that included Dr. Anthony D. Cortese, Senator John F. Kerry (D-MA), Teresa Heinz Kerry, Bruce Droste, and others. This group sought to establish an organization dedicated to bringing about the change in society that is vital to the success and livelihood of every current and future living being: a change for a just and sustainable future.

We began with a multimillion dollar, ten-year outreach and advocacy effort to catalyze such transformative change, change that would have universities produce students prepared for character and citizenship as well as commerce and career in the 21st century.

Our work over the past twelve years has helped bring to life the elegant concept of Education for Sustainability (EFS), and we have succeeded in helping expand EFS into a national movement. Among many other things, this work brought forth vital networks of energized individuals and institutions to capitalize on the knowledge and projects already taking place around EFS. These networks would not have begun without the catalyst of the Second Nature team and the collaborations and work of like-minded organizations and individuals. We also provided some of the first methods for thinking of the university as a fully integrated community.

Today, we see the EFS movement growing exponentially throughout this country and the world. More and more institutions are bringing sustainability into curriculum and research, and incorporating its principles into operations and work with local communities. Students are voting with their feet and attending colleges and universities with strong environmental and sustainability programs providing a competitive incentive for institutions to do more in this area. Once enrolled in higher education institutions, students have been leading efforts for more education on and practice of sustainability. Other institutions have realized huge cost savings and public respect through programs on energy and resource management, campus and building design, transportation management and by changing purchasing and investment practices.