A life-time natural resources enthusiast and career-long forest scientist and educator, I have both passion and expertise in applying nature based tenets and principles to education and leadership. Great Blue Heron, LLC provides a platform for extending my related acquired knowledge and practice to entities seeking excellence in leadership and education. Great Blue Heron applies Nature's Wisdom to Life and Work.Speaking and Writing -- Although I offer nature-based consulting services to enterprises broadly, I am now focusing my efforts on writing and speaking about Nature-Inspired living, learning, serving, and leading. My speaking is motivational and inspirational. My contract writing emphasizes developing Land Legacy Stories that tell the tale of past, current, and future Earth stewardship by landowners who intend for their relationship with their property to live beyond them.Nature-Based Consulting -- Great Blue Heron will steer you toward channeling inspiration and humility, employing high purpose, full passion, and an intimate connection to Nature. Great Blue Heron can infuse and inject Nature’s Wisdom via direct consulting and coaching, inspiring presentations, mentoring, and workshop/seminar engagement, and with targeted writing. Mission: Apply lessons written in or inspired by Nature to achieve enterprise and life success.Vision: GBH clients will perform better, understand more clearly their Earth home, and embrace the tenets of responsible Earth Stewardship.Web Site: stevejonesgbh.com/Books by Steve Jones, GBH CEO: Nature-Based Leadership: Lessons for Living, Learning, Serving, and Leading -- at the publisher; will be released and announced January 2017 Nature-Inspired Learning and Leading: Applying Nature's Wisdom to Life and Work -- at the editor; will be released and announced third quarter 2017 Third in the Nature and Leadership Series (Harnessing Nature's Wisdom and Inspiration) -- 90 percent drafted;

Created in April 2018, the Foundation exists for the sole purpose of securing additional resources to support Alabama's 22 State Parks.

Edu Alliance is an international higher education consulting firm with offices in Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates and Bloomington, Indiana, United States of America. Edu Alliance announced the formation of the Advisory Council for North America January 9, 2017. I am among the nine founding Advisory Council members.

Forty-three-and-one-half years beyond earning a BS in forestry, I have come to believe that every lesson for living, learning, serving, and leading is either written indelibly in or compellingly inspired by nature. Since summer 2013, colleagues (old and new) have encouraged me to further develop the concept, memorialize its precepts and tenets, and even create an academic core built upon Nature Based Leadership (NBL). Several of us launched a still-emerging Nature Based Leadership Institute (NBLI) in 2015, based at Antioch University New England. Because I am no longer President at AUNE, I remain involved only as an affiliated NBLI Founder, not as an employee.What is Nature Based Leadership? Nature Based Leadership (NBL) defines and elaborates an approach to leadership steeped in the ways of nature. NBL borrows lessons from the ageless evolution of individual species and communities. Far more species have failed than survived over the vast sweep of time. Individual species, just as any enterprise (business, NGO, and any entity), seek to reproduce, to carry the line forward; just as any enterprise seeks sustainability. Species employ adaptability, resilience, competition, specificity (niche exploitation), efficiency, reciprocity, and fecundity among many other strategies. Species often depend upon complex inter-relationships within the community (ecosystem) they occupy and, in part, compose. Each species has a plan, hard wired in DNA. NBL identifies successful strategies and relationships, and extracts those that translate to enterprise applications that leaders can apply. NBL also leans heavily on nature’s beauty, awe, wonder, and inspiration. NBL embraces tenets that can sustain the individual enterprise and assure Earth stewardship and human well-being. NBL implores and enables us to care for our common home and our fellow travelers.

As Interim President, I bridged the period from the previous President's retirement (June 30) through the start of a permanent replacement January 1, 2018. FSU is a regional campus of the West Virginia University System. Enrollment is ~4,200 students. I am privileged and honored to have served this interim appointment at a special university in a region I know well and with a mission I embrace.

I began serving as president of Antioch University New England (AUNE) effective July 1, 2013. AUNE stands as one of the five-campuses of Antioch University (NH, two in CA, OH, and WA). We accept our mission to inspire, educate, and enable our graduates to change the world. AUNE's 10,000 graduate degree recipients since our 1964 founding really are changing the world -- to achieve economic, environmental, and social justice. June 27, 2016 the Antioch University system announced that it is deeply consolidating operations and eliminating all five campus presidents, their administrative assistants, and the campus Boards of Trustees.Remarkably, AUNE's graduate degree focus, disciplinary orientation, and aspirational vision align perfectly with my own personal and professional passions. Master's and doctoral programs in environmental science and sustainability account for one-third of AUNE's degrees. Graduate degrees in business, education, and applied/clinical psychology round out the University's practice/theory oriented mission to enable and challenge graduates to perform fulfilling lives of meaning and engagement.Antioch University New England aspires to international prominence, renewed vigor, and focused service to our students -- locally, regionally, and internationally. We view ourselves as force-multipliers, attracting students who care, who see real need, who feel a sense of urgency for tomorrow, and who choose to act. We provide an intimate, customized learning environment that accommodates securing early- to mid-career graduate degree completion. We meld theory and practice, real life experiences, and meaningful projects that accomplish optimal learning and empowerment.I have never experienced a more passion-fueled and purpose-driven institution of higher education. AUNE lives its mission -- through its faculty, staff, students, alumni, and stakeholders, who are intent upon "winning victories for humanity"!

Once I accepted the Presidency of Antioch University New England (AUNE) in early April, 2013, I accommodated Urbana University's need to transition to new leadership. During the intervening period, I served as Special Adviser (at Urbana University) to the Interim President, assisting to assure a smooth and orderly leadership transition. I also used accumulated leave and prepared intensively for the mental and physical move to my new assignment at AUNE.

I completed nearly five years as president of this private liberal arts university in west-central Ohio, directing a comprehensive top-to-bottom turn-around of a fine but financially struggling institution (founded 1850). The university, its stakeholders, and employees celebrated our successes and began looking eagerly to the future. We re-branded Urban University by focusing practices, services, and programs on Building Solid Futures -- One Student at a Time. We emphasized sustainability (social, economic, and environmental elements) from food service practices, to building and grounds management, to academic programming. Adopting the tenets of sustainability added another key element to Urbana's identity and elevated its reputation as an agent for change and leader of innovation. April 2012 we published Urbana University's first Annual Sustainability Report: http://www.urbana.edu/documents/contentdocuments/document_23_5_236.pdf. Please take a look to evaluate the University's sustainability accomplishments and see what the future holds for UU sustainability.November 16, 2012 we threw the ceremonial switch for a 1.2-acre, 510 kilowatt solar photo-voltaic array (operating since late October). The University signed a contract mid-2013 to undertake a comprehensive, campus-wide energy retrofit, arranged before my June departure.I am very pleased to have been designated a Senior Fellow in Sustainability Leadership (2010) by the International Sustainability Council for my lifetime and UU-focussed sustainability leadership endeavors.

UAF is the nation's northernmost university and international research center (America's Arctic University) with $410 million annual operating budget, 3,500 faculty and staff, and 10,000 students. I thoroughly enjoyed every aspect of leading this great university and experiencing the magnificence of Alaska. I'm pleased that I could play a role in transforming the university into a more mature and powerful research university, with a confirmed and recognized international identity.UAF covers a lot of territory, with staff and facilities at 38 locations across the state, four of them above the Arctic circle. What a thrill and pleasure it was to see so much of Alaska and travel north of the Circle 17 times over the four year period!

The Office of Extension and Engagement, which began operations with my arrival as its first head, provides leadership and vision for University partnerships with business, industry, communities, other universities, government, individuals, and groups. We instituted many new and exciting endeavors during the three year period of my service: secured funding ($36 million) for design, construction, and up-fit of the Biomanufacturing Training and Education Center; led the team that obtained $3.7 lillion to create and operate the Food Systems Leadership Institute; and brought the Extension and Engagement unit to successful and sustainable operation at NC State.Serving at the edge of a university and engaging with individuals, communities, business, industry, and other entities across the state provides such an extraordinary way to make the university meaningful, serving real people, meeting real needs, and doing so in real time. I was able to "learn" the state, appreciate its many dimensions, and understand its people, economy, and environment.I also relished the privilege of participating in Leadership North Carolina, another vehicle for seeing and knowing the state, and for developing strong linkages with the diverse participants from across the state.

The ACES Director role was my first entry into a full time university administrative post. This venture involved leading a Federal Court-created unified Cooperative Extension system combining the formerly distinct extension services of Auburn and Alabama A&M universities. The Court Decree mandated the combined system to remedy decades of segregative state funding to the two institutions. I was the system's first director. Through a lot of hard work we succeeded in forging the two disparate and feuding operations into a nearly seamless entity. I enjoyed bringing order from near chaos; what a genuine pleasure to transform tension to synergy. And, what a joy to once more serve across an entire state, as I did in Pennsylvania and later in North Carolina and Alaska.

I grew to love Happy Valley over the course of my nine years at Penn State in the School of Forest Resources. My split appointment in extension/outreach and research gave me exposure to forestry interests across the entire state, including private, industrial, and State agency landholders/ managers. Penn's Woods (Pennsylvania) is a great place to study the complex and very real interactions among economic, social, and environmental forces influencing natural resource utilization, management, and conservation. The state is also a wonderful living laboratory and classroom for enabling landowners, managers, and the public to make better-informed decisions through education and technology transfer.

Following 12 years of forest industry employment, my wife and I made a tough decision to return to ESF to obtain my doctoral degree. During those three very intense years of study, research, field work, and writing, I directed an ESF-based inter-industry education and communication consortium, the Northeast Petroleum-Forest Resources Cooperative, operating in SW New York and NW Pennsylvania. Tension between a reinvigorated pertroleum industry (exploration and production) and a high value timber resource in an area where the surface and sub-surface rights are overwhelmingly under separate ownership, served as impetus for creating the NEP-FRC and the forum it provided for inter-industry understanding and cooperation.I also obtained my Ph.D. during this period, conducting a field-focused research project funded fully by Hammermill Paper Company (since acquired by International Paper Company). What a thrill it was to continue my association with the forest products industry on a project that enabled more informed management of renewable natural resources.

I enjoyed 12 years with Union Camp Corporation (now a part of International Paper), serving in various capacities and located at Franklin, VA, Savannah, GA, and Prattville, AL. My positions included working circle forester in VA and NC, procurement forester in VA and NC, research project leader (forest fertilization and nutrition) across the six southeastern states, manager of land use and forest practices (corporate Office of Environmental Affairs), and land manager over Alabama lands (500 square miles of company-owned forests). My time with UCC provided a rewarding, stimulating, and satisfying way to learn and grow professionally and personally!