Better Together: Alan Townsend’s Arrival Marks an Exciting New Chapter for Sustainability at Wake Forest
Perspectives on Sustainability, Quarterly Newsletter
By Dedee DeLongpré Johnston, Wake Forest’s Chief Sustainability Officer
In a post I wrote titled Better Together, I reflected on a reality that becomes clearer with each passing day: solving the most complex, high-stakes environmental challenges of our time isn’t something any single discipline, department, or individual can do alone. It requires an all-hands-on-deck approach—a purposeful integration of specialists, generalists, practitioners, scholars, and community stakeholders working in concert. In short, It Takes a Forest.
At Wake Forest, our motto, Pro Humanitate, reminds us that our purpose is bound to collective flourishing. To create lasting impact for the betterment of humanity, we need everyone.
That is why I am so optimistic about Dr. Alan Townsend’s leadership of Wake Forest’s Andrew Sabin Family Center for Environment and Sustainability.
The Ultimate Team Game
When Alan shared his introductory reflections with our campus community recently, one phrase stuck with me: he described charting a healthier relationship between people and the planet upon which we all depend as the ultimate team game.
Alan is a renowned environmental scientist whose work has spanned the globe. And, his leadership is defined by humility, curiosity, and an unwavering belief in the power of people. He recognizes that world-class science alone cannot heal our relationship with the non-human natural world; it must be coupled with human connection, storytelling, inclusive strategy, and a shared commitment to action.
Bridging Research, Practice, and Place
At Wake Forest, we have built an approach to sustainability that is rooted in distributed cross-functional leadership and place-based education. Through the Office of Sustainability, we work across educational, operational, and engagement domains to transform our campus into a model institutional environment where students and faculty engage with real-world challenges and solutions.
The Sabin Center facilitates interdisciplinary scholarship and solutions-driven research for global impact. Collaboration between the Sabin Center and our campus-wide sustainability efforts yields new possibilities for regional place-based learning, climate solutions, and community-wide engagement. Our collective networks of scholars and practitioners are ready and willing to engage. The upcoming Sabin Center conference will showcase work already underway. Participants will have the opportunity to learn from and with leaders whose global-to-local impact demonstrates the power of collaboration in generating sustainable solutions.
Centering Hope and Community
We live in a moment where discourse is too often dominated by despair. In spite of humanity’s challenges, Alan Townsend centers his leadership on a relentless ethic of hope and agency—a conviction that while our world faces immense threats, we unquestionably possess the capacity, intellect, and collective power to take action.
That hopeful, human-centered ethos is at the core of everything we do at Wake Forest, where efficacy is born from action. When we combine top-tier scientific inquiry with operational practice, specialist expertise with generalist facilitation, global vision with campus engagement, we create something far greater than the sum of its parts.
I am more confident than ever that when we bring our collective strengths to the table, we are truly Better Together.