SN Initiatives

Since 1993, Second Nature (SN) has worked with over 4,000 faculty and administrators at more than 500 colleges and universities to help make the principles of sustainability the foundation of all learning, practice, and
collaboration with local communities. Today, in order to help higher education move from simple good intentions to
strategic transformative action, Second Nature focuses its energy on initiating, advising, and supporting select high-leverage national and regional education for sustainability (EFS) activities for which there is a clear need and committed support.

Past initiatives have included advancing EFS networks at the state, regional, and national levels; building the nationally respected online clearinghouse for Education for Sustainability information; and conducting a multi-million dollar, ten year advocacy and outreach effort that was instrumental in launching the higher education EFS movement.

Current initiatives include:

Helping advance two new higher education associations: the Higher Education Associations' Sustainability Consortium (HEASC) and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).
Working with AASHE and ecoAmerica to launch the American College and University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, a high-visibility effort to address global warming by getting a joint commitment to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at their institutions, ultimately leading to climate neutral campuses.
Supporting the 30 leading youth-led organizations aimed at reversing global warming through the Campus Climate Challenge.
Working with the Campaign for Environmental Literacy’s higher education initiative to secure millions of federal grant dollars for campus sustainability programs.

More information:

Helping Campuses Move from Good Intentions to Strategic Action

Individuals at literally thousands of college and university campuses across the country are coming to recognize the necessity and advantages of making sustainability an integral goal of learning and practice, and ultimately the need for leading transformative change throughout their entire institutions.

Such transformative change can be immensely challenging to initiate. On-campus champions of EFS inevitably face the immensely challenging questions like “How do we get started?” and “How can we institutionalize sustainability efforts?” Colleges and universities are complex systems, and a comprehensive understanding of their structure and culture are essential to developing a plan for systemic change. more

Education for Sustainability

Second Nature envisions a world in which all present and future humans are healthy, have their basic needs met, have fair and equitable access to Earth's resources, and have a decent quality of life. We imagine a sustainable world.

Part 1: Envisioning a Sustainable Future

In a sustainable world, we imagine society would celebrate cultural diversity and increase the biological diversity and complexity of the ecosystems on which we all depend. Simultaneously, we would have stabilized population and resource consumption at a level that is within the carrying capacity of Earth's ecosystems. To attain this, we must reinvent the world socially, economically and environmentally. more

Part 2: The Role of Higher Education

A sustained, long-term effort to transform education at all levels is critical to the change in mindset necessary to achieve this vision. Higher education has the power to lead in this endeavor by exercising its role in training future leaders, teachers and other professionals and in producing wisdom needed to face the challenges of an increasingly complex world. more

Part 3: The Transformation of Higher Education

A transformative educational experience will be essential in creating the shift in thinking, values and action necessary for a healthy, just and environmentally sustainable society. In shapsing education for the twenty-first century, we envision 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. more

Second Nature’s Beginnings

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 Education for Sustainability. These networks would not have begun without the catalyst provided by the people of Second Nature 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.