A Message from Our President

Dear Friends,  

At Second Nature, we believe that bold and transformational commitments to sustainability, beginning with leadership in higher education, are ways to move society towards a future that redefines and restores our relationship with our environment. The initiatives resulting from college and university presidents’ pledge to become carbon neutral and embed sustainability into the education experience of all their students have been a huge driver of national change in areas of campus operations, student mobilization and culture, and emissions reductions.

While Second Nature will continue to strengthen its existing climate mitigation programs to facilitate and catalyze sustainability efforts for higher education leaders, it is important to realize that in the relatively brief time since Second Nature began, the world has significantly changed in its relationship to sustainability. As a leading change agent, we are working to be responsive and adaptive to this new reality.

Second Nature’s mitigation efforts are fully integrated into the suite of our responsive, leadership-relevant programs. The synergies developed as a result of this integration are designed to catalyze changes within higher education leadership across the broad spectrum of sustainability. These include resilience, adaptation, finance, and policy - themes that are all tailored to integrate into broader societal goals for healthy environmental, social and economic systems.

As we continue our move ahead into one of the most challenging environmental eras that humanity has known, we will be stepping into unknown spaces with uncertain outcomes. This is why the need for partnerships, collaborations, and interdisciplinary approaches are so important. One specialist can’t solve these problems. We need to come together in innovative ways to creatively form solutions that not only work for today, but set us on an adaptive path to address the solutions we will need tomorrow.

Our work stems from the idea, to paraphrase Wendell Berry, that when we separate humans from the environment, we make a profound distinction between it and ourselves. We hope you will join us in actively shaping and sustaining our life support systems so that all things - people and non-people - can flourish and thrive.

Thanks for your support,

Tim Carter, Ph.D.
President