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. 

By Gabriela Boscio, Program Associate, Second Nature. Reposted with permission from the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE)

Second Nature started a new video series on January 21, 2015. The series—titled “Sustainability Sit-Downs”—consists of 12 interviews featuring sustainability leaders from various backgrounds. Participants discuss the role of Higher Education in making a sustainable society, as well as current challenges and more.

Here are five reasons why higher education sustainability professionals should watch:

1. Get Diverse Perspectives on Sustainability in Higher Education

Interviewees in this series include people with various roles and titles, such as President, Sustainability Coordinator and Vice-Chancellor, among others. They also represent many types of institutions, including large public university systems, small liberal arts colleges, non-profit organizations, private sector companies and tribal colleges. This wide range of experiences feeds the conversation, helps us learn from each other and puts the issues into a larger context.

by Gabriela Boscio, Program Associate, Second Nature

“For small creatures such as we the vastness is bearable only through love.”
― Carl Sagan

(This post is part of a series by the Second Nature team about why we do what we do.)

How does love grow? When do you know it has taken root? How can you pinpoint its beginning?

My passion for sustainability is something that’s been growing within me for most of my life, and I am not sure exactly when or why it started. As a child, I loved plants and animals. I loved reading about them and learning about them, and I loved observing nature. I remember thinking in grade school that I wanted to be a scientist when I grew up, because I wanted to keep learning about nature, through exploration and investigation. My family supported and encouraged this love by providing me with copious amounts of nature books, magazines and collectible wildlife fact cards, as well as by spending time with me outdoors, and putting up with my incessant animal-factoid sharing (“Did you know baby cheetahs chirps like birds?”).

Example of a book from my childhood. Joyce Rogers Wolkomir and Richard Wolkomir. 1992.

by Rima Mulla, Communications Manager, Second Nature

Found, in the Second Nature archives, evidence that our organizational website once reflected the critical and pivotal nature of our work:

Vice President Al Gore loved it…in 1998.

Vote daily for Second Nature in the Carrots for a Cause contest.
Multiply your vote by recruiting colleagues and friends to support us.

We really need to bring our website up to 2012 standards. Thank you!

By Ulli Klein, Director of Operations and Communications

We need to update our website! And with that I mean that we probably need to start from scratch. What looked great in the 90s hasn’t changed a whole lot since then. We have invested our attention and staff time into our initiatives and into their respective websites and we are proud of them. Now it’s time to try to help out the Second Nature website in the Carrots for a Cause contest where we are currently in 3rd place to win a website makeover!

Our Carrots for a Cause took a trip to Faneuil Hall today to check in with John Adams and pitch our case to him.

Pitching our case!

I would like to report back that Sam Adams stated he would MOST DEFINITELY vote for us.

So should you!

So please help us by voting daily, bookmarking the voting page and, just as importantly, spreading the word to anyone you think would like to support Second Nature’s mission.

Last Friday, I had the opportunity to participate on a panel at the 2nd Annual Slow Living Summit in Brattleboro, VT.

‘Slow Living’ as described by the organizers; “…is shorthand for taking a more reflective approach to living and work; an approach that is mindful of  impacts on the environment, on Earth, and on communities; and that incorporates resilience —  our ability to “bounce back” from the consequences of climate change, resource depletion and other changes and stresses...“Slow” encodes the transformative change from faster and cheaper to slower and better—where quality, community and the future matter.”

The Summit program was broken into multiple tracks, covering a range of topics including community supported agriculture, media & journalism, sustainable investing & finance, community building, renewable energy, and education to name a few. For a detailed description of the program click here.

Our session was titled, EDUCATION: Sustainability in Higher Education: Leadership by Example? It was moderated by Jerelyn Wilson, Outreach Director at Building Green LLC, and included the following panelist:

by Steve Muzzy, Senior Associate, Second Nature

(This post is part of a weekly series by the Second Nature team about why we do what we do.)

[The following post documents my personal journey with higher education. The experiences and views expressed are solely my own.]

When I graduated from high school my classmates dispersed in one of three directions; entered the work force, joined the military, or enrolled in college. I was indifferent about my future after high school. Most of my decisions at this point were based on what I didn’t want to do, or on what others told me to do.

My thought process went something like this:

Should I enter the work force? I grew up in rural Massachusetts and had been chopping and stacking wood since I was 5 years old. My dad was a self-employed, heavy equipment operator so I was well skilled with a shovel and in jumping in ditches. I’d been washing dishes and doing other odd jobs since I received my drivers license at 16. I knew what the work force looked like for me and it was not what I wanted.

What about the military? I had uncles and neighbors that served or were serving and the prospect of combat did not resonate with me. This option was quickly ruled out.

Enroll in college? The only person in my family to graduate from college was a cousin who I had little contact with. To my knowledge neither my family’s friends, nor neighbors, had any experience with college. My perspective of college was informed by what I heard on the radio, or saw on television – I believed higher education was ‘progressive’ and provided space to explore vast ideas and unlimited experiences. I also believed that college prepared you for ‘professional’ employment.

by Adrien Tofighi, Second Nature Intern
(This post is part of a weekly series by the Second Nature team about why we do what we do.)

There is no specific reason for me to help you understand why I am part of this kind of work. Although I could single out a few events, I would be discrediting every little experience that I’ve had throughout my life, each of which has indicated to me that this choice of lifestyle is the only logical one for me.

I could mention my love for always being in nature since I was a child as I grew up on an old farm, harvesting honey from our beehives (which are no longer there), in the middle of Southern France far from urban life and television. Or maybe it was a bit of influence from my father who spent his early doctoral years researching solar energy at the world’s largest solar furnace. What about my mother? She has spent her entire lifetime encouraging positive thoughts, positive comments, positive actions, or as my Zoroastrian ancestors would say “good thoughts, good words, good deeds”.

Yet, this blog has more to do with climate change, so maybe it was the time that I realized deforestation was real, so real that I couldn’t get to work one morning in Haiti as I woke up to a landslide that had devastated many of my neighbors’ homes after one night of heavy rain, and taken the life of several. A landslide of rocks and mud that was more than three miles long and at least 15 feet high, you could even stand on top of it and follow its path up the mountain to the right where the deforestation was clear, and down the mountain to the left, to realize the insignificance of homes and cars when facing the laws of nature. It was, by the way, the fourth one of the year in that neighborhood.