Blog Archive for August 2015

August 24, 2015

by: Janna Cohen-Rosenthal & Brett Pasinella, Second Nature 

The new White House Clean Power Plan is part of the administration's attempts to address climate change. This plan focuses on the greenhouse gas emissions from power plants around the country. The federal government will set specific reduction targets for each state, it is then up to the state governments to decide how best to meet their individual target. The impact to any individual signatory of the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment (ACUPCC) will have a lot to do with their state's policies and history of existing energy and climate policies. The White House provides  a list of potential impacts for each state, however, some general predictions can be made nationally.

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August 24, 2015

by Florencia Bluthgen, Communications and Education Intern, Second Nature

Minneapolis, Minnesota will host this year’s Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE) Annual Conference, which will be focusing on the theme of “Transforming Sustainability Education”. From October 25-28, sustainability professionals, senior leaders, students, faculty, staff, businesses, and media will come together to celebrate and inspire campus sustainability innovations.

This year Second Nature will once again be sending a full team to the conference. Timothy Carter (President), Janna Cohen-Rosenthal (Director of Membership Programs), and Brett Pasinella (Senior Manager of Innovative Services), will be participating in and leading several sessions, such as:

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August 7, 2015
Posted in: Why We Work

by Florencia Bluthgen, Communications and Education Intern, Second Nature
(This post is part of a series by the Second Nature team about why we do what we do.)

When I was 19 years old, a friend of mine invited me to an activity of the nonprofit organization where she was volunteering: Un Techo para mi Pais (the Spanish for "A Roof For My Country"). We were going for a weekend to build transitional houses with families from low-income communities in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I had seen these types of communities before and had even participated in small volunteering activities in high school, but getting to know them personally and listening to their stories and dreams made something in my head click.

I kept volunteering in that organization and, in 2010, after the earthquake, I was offered the possibility to go help in Haiti. That experience marked a turning point in my life. Haiti was the poorest country in Latin America and the Caribbean even before the earthquake. One of the characteristics of the country is that, in order to pay its debts to other countries, Haiti deforested all the land, making it very vulnerable to any type of natural disaster. There is no humidity there. Crossing the frontier between Dominican Republic and Haiti is a very moving experience; for such a small island everything changes: the climate, the infrastructure, the people, the language, and the opportunities. When I went there, the poverty striked me. People had lost everything and they were living in tents on the ground. Yet, the highest classes had barely been affected. I knew I would never let myself ignore that reality.

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August 7, 2015
Posted in: Second Nature Team

by Steve Muzzy, Senior Manager, Membership Programs, Second Nature

Last month I attended the 14th Annual California Higher Education Sustainability Conference (CHESC), hosted by San Francisco State University. This is an impressive gathering and great show of California's strength and leadership in campus sustainability. I attended three terrific sessions focusing on the following topics; net zero energy planning, fossil fuel divestment, and my personal favorite, student engagement and carbon neutrality.

The student engagement focus on carbon neutrality is particularly exciting because it aligns with institutional strategic priorities and collaborates across administrative, faculty, and staff departments, all while being student centered. So who is doing it? The University of California Office of the President (UCOP) has set an aggressive target of achieving carbon neutrality by 2025 (Scopes 1 & 2) and has formed a Global Climate Leadership Council, comprised of University of California administrators, faculty, staff, students and outside experts to provide recommendations for eliminating operational GHG emissions by 2025. 

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August 7, 2015

by Anne Waple, Vice-President and Chief Innovation Officer, Second Nature

In this blog over the next few weeks, we will break down what the White House’s finalized Clean Power Plan means for us in higher education, and what it means for the country at large.  

While we, at Second Nature, are not politically partisan and do not engage in political advocacy, we are, of course, supporting leadership in and aggressive action on carbon reduction and also recently on climate resilience. The new White House announcement illustrates that nationally too, aggressive action on climate change is warranted and possible. We fervently support this new announcement and the actions that have been taken over the last several years to get here.

We invite you to view the videos that the White House produced around the announcement as well as their infographic that steps through the impacts, the plan, and the recent progress that has been made nationally. We encourage you take a look at this information, and we will follow up with more details on what it might mean for us in the coming weeks.

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