Dr. Mitchell Thomashow
Mitchell devotes his life and work to promoting ecological awareness, environmental learning, improvisational thinking, social networking, and organizational excellence. Currently his passions are teaching, writing, and advising, cultivating opportunities and exchanges that transform how people engage with environmental learning, sustainability, and the arts.
Mitchell’s books have significantly influenced environmental studies education: To Know the World: A New Vision for Environmental Learning, The Nine Elements of a Sustainable Campus, Bringing the Biosphere Home, and Ecological Identity.
2018 – 2020
Mitchell works independently. His projects include writing (most recently To Know the World), teaching, and advising organizations, programs, and individuals. He takes great pleasure in connecting people from his lifetime of cultivating networks and associations.
2016 – 2017
From 2016 – 2017, Mitchell was the Sustainability Catalyst Fellow at Philanthropy Northwest. The Fellowship promotes awareness of sustainability, community, and place. He wrote a report, Pacific Northwest Changemakers, that profiles eight exemplary, community-based sustainability projects. You can read it here.
2011 – 2015
From 2011 – 2015, Mitchell was the Director of the Presidential Fellows Program at Second Nature. He assisted the executive leadership of colleges and universities in promoting a comprehensive sustainability agenda on their campuses, provided executive consulting on climate action planning, organizational leadership, curricular implementation, and community investment.
2006 – 2011
From 2006 – 2011, Mitchell was the president of Unity College in Maine. With his management team, he integrated concepts of ecology, sustainability, natural history, wellness, participatory governance, and community service into all aspects of college and community life. This included construction of The Unity House, the first LEED Platinum President’s Residence in North America, and the TeraHaus, a passive house student residence, as well as comprehensive campus energy planning, an integrated approach to growing food on campus, and a new academic master plan.
1976 – 2006
Previously from 1976 – 2006, Mitchell was the Chair of the Environmental Studies program at Antioch University New England. He founded an interdisciplinary environmental studies doctoral program and worked collaboratively to grow and nourish a suite of engaging Masters programs, geared to working adults.
For four decades Mitchell has lived in the hill country of southwest New Hampshire in the shadow of Mount Monadnock.
He loves to explore the fields, forests, wetlands, hills, and lakes of Northern New England. His recreational interests include basketball, baseball, bicycling, board games, jazz piano, electronic keyboards, musical composition and recording, guitars, hiking, and lake swimming.