Overview
“Wooded Isle, Museum of Science and Industry” by Terry Evans
The Center's Mission
To explore and promote moral and civic responsibilities to human communities and to natural ecosystems and landscapes.
The Center for Humans and Nature promotes greater conservation, biological and cultural diversity, health, and social justice in the interactions between natural systems and human communities. It aims to define and express a new vision of ethical responsibility and ecological citizenship. It pursues its mission through a three-pronged strategy of (1) philosophical and historical research, (2) ethics, scientific, and civic education, and (3) policy analysis, regional planning, and regional civic action.
The Center for Humans and Nature is an independent, non-partisan, and non-profit organization with offices in New York City, Chicago, Columbia, South Carolina and Baraboo, WI. As a private operating foundation, CHN financially supports its own programs and provides shared funding for collaborative work with other organizations and individuals.
The Center for Humans and Nature is open to many approaches to understanding the relationships between our species and the rest of the ecosphere. We are particularly interested in a critical exploration of the history of philosophy, ethics, and civic responsibility (including the history of conservation and public policy) in the light of the key concepts and findings of evolutionary biology and ecology.
The Center's Approach
The inspiration for the Center for Humans and Nature began in the Humans and Nature Program that was active at The Hastings Center (Garrison, NY) from 1995-2001. In 2002 the Center for Humans and Nature was founded as an independent, not-for-profit organization. One of the most significant projects undertaken during the 1990s was the Chicago based Nature, Polis, and Ethics project (which is still ongoing today). [See “Nature, Polis, and Ethics,” Hastings Center Report Special Supplement Nov/Dec. 1998.] From these beginnings we have developed two principal intellectual commitments:
- Promoting critical research and education at the intersection of the humanities and the life sciences, especially evolutionary biology and ecology;
- Envisioning responsible relationships between human and natural communities conducive to the long-term mutual well-being of these communities, their resilience and flourishing.
The Center integrates research, education, and regional civic practice. Our programs seek to preserve resilient landscapes and to build local “cultures of conservation,” in the broad sense, including both our natural and our cultural heritage. The Center is particularly active in New York, the Chicago region, and South Carolina, and it works with numerous collaborators throughout the U.S. and internationally. Among these collaborating organizations are The Land Institute, the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, the American Museum of Natural History, the International Crane Foundation, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and the IUCN, among many others. In its work thus far, the Center has produced innovative work on the ethics of the relationships of human communities and the natural world, including biologically informed worldviews of Charles Darwin and Aldo Leopold, agricultural biotechnology, water resources and modern environmental crises, and new criteria for urban regional planning.
Research
Central to the Center's mission is a coordinated agenda of research that seeks to articulate a broad conception of social and ethical responsibility. This responsibility entails comprehensive and long-term concern for the dynamic interactions and mutual flourishing of human and natural communities. A more adequate understanding of these interactions is the foundation of a viable, just, and resilient world for all living beings. The Center conducts its research through interdisciplinary groups that bring together persons of diverse backgrounds and cultural traditions. Our research draws knowledge and insight from many fields pertinent to our mission, including evolutionary, ecological and conservation biology, public health and the health sciences, ethics, philosophy, theology, the humanities, law, history, environmental planning, and the social and policy sciences.
Education
The Center's research is meant to encourage and elicit broad public dialogue. Our education and outreach efforts aim to articulate cogent and compelling ideas about our responsibilities to the human and natural communities and landscapes within which we all live. Through education and public deliberation we can help to create the civic capacities necessary to sustain a broad ranging and refocused conservation movement—national conservation with a social conscience. Our educational programs include curriculum materials for academic and continuing professional education programs, public conferences and lectures, and publications aimed at informed and engaged citizens disseminated in both print and electronic forms.
Regional Civic Practice
The practical work of the Center is focused on particular regions whose boundaries are defined ecologically rather than politically or administratively. Collaborating with existing networks and coalitions of concerned citizens, academic institutions, and community organizations, we conduct seminars and conferences that serve as a catalyst for fresh strategic thinking and planning. Our long range goal is to engage policy makers, local officials, professional planners, environmental activists, conservationists, and educators in a searching, rigorous discussion of the often implicit philosophical and scientific foundations that animate, or ought to animate, their work. We also strive to forge links among organizations that have not worked together before and seek out unrecognized common interests and overlapping missions.
The Center for Humans and Nature engages in a variety of projects that involve research, education, and community outreach or action. These projects are of two principal types:
The first are collaborative research projects. They involve basic research and scholarship on the conceptual, historical, and ethical foundations of such fields as evolutionary biology, ecology, public health, democratic political theory, the philosophy of biology, and the philosophy of nature. Examples include projects with the New School for Social Research, the Columbia School of Public Health, the Yale Institute for Biospheric Studies, the American Museum of Natural History, and the Chicago Botanic Garden.
The second type of projects are collaborative civic projects. These involve work with a particular region or on a particular environmental issue and bring together a network of scientists, philosophers, activists, planners, civic leaders and concerned citizens. Examples include the Chicago metropolitan area, the Mississippi River watershed, the South Carolina Lowcountry area, the Hudson River Valley and the Catskill Region in New York State. These civic collaborations typically sponsor a series of ongoing seminars and organize larger public meetings and conferences for the broader community.
Both types of project draw upon the expertise of Center scholars, other researchers and academic experts, civic professionals, and concerned citizens, producing a focused discussion of the philosophical, practical, and policy dimensions of our social and ethical responsibilities to humans and nature. Our efforts at education and outreach grow out of our research and take many forms, including working papers, articles, books, educational seminars, and civic forums.