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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.