Morven is a place-based (land-centered) sustainability lab where a community of faculty, students, staff, visiting scholars and community members explore, discover and create more enduring and just ways of multi-species living in the world. Morven’s diverse rural lands—shaped by thousands of years of environmental and human history--are simultaneously a living landscape classroom, laboratory and sanctuary. Here, in the classroom and in the field, we incorporate traditional practices and seek new practices and models necessary to address the global environmental crisis, especially as it is changing the Virginia Piedmont, our regional home.

Morven affords the broad intellectual reach of the UVA community—from the environmental humanities to the environmental sciences, from architecture and engineering to law, from art to economics—a shared space for transformative research and transformational experiential learning commensurate with the magnitude of contemporary socio-ecological challenges, such as a changing climate, food insecurity and equity as well as the loss of biodiversity.

We are defined by:

A commitment to healthy lands, beautiful landscapes and a biodiverse environment as vital to a thriving culture.

An appreciation of the affective role of landscape experience for increasing personal well-being and engendering collective identity. Morven will have open doors for informal activities of UVA’s diverse and vital community so our members, inspired and renewed by the Morven experience, can address and respond to the complexity of the global environmental crisis.

An ethical understanding of place that honors and acknowledges the ancestral land practices of the Indigenous nations who lived, hunted and foraged on these hills above the Rivanna and James Rivers. We honor the ingenuity, skill and tenacity of the enslaved people who shaped and maintained these lands. We seek their guidance as we co-create plans for Morven’s future.