UVA’s Experiential and Experimental Grounds.

Morven, UVA’s Experiential and Experimental Grounds, fosters collaborative learning and exploration grounded in socio-ecological values and leading to innovative policies and practices that tackle urgent climate challenges..

MISSION. A place-based sustainability lab

Through innovative pan-university exploration and novel community co-creation, Morven’s Experimental and Experiential Grounds transform how we perceive, imagine, discover, and test alternative sustainable futures where humans, other species, and the planet can flourish. Through both individual and collective experiential learning and exploring, Morven’s landscape laboratory incubates the next generation of citizen leaders prepared to address our changing climate.

Morven is a place-based, land-centered sustainability lab where faculty, students, staff, visiting scholars and community members explore, discover and co-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 integrate traditional land practices and model new practices necessary to address the global environmental crisis, especially as it is changing the Virginia Piedmont, our regional home.

 Research at Morven is a core expression of the Sustainability Lab vision. Guided by the principles of place-based sustainability and cultural landscape stewardship, research at Morven fosters innovative, transdisciplinary inquiry that addresses urgent climate and ecological challenges. Morven affords UVA’s broad intellectual expertise—from the environmental humanities to the environmental sciences, from architecture and engineering to law, from art to economics— and our community’s deep local knowledge—a shared space for consequential research and transformational experiential learning commensurate with the magnitude of contemporary socio-ecological challenges, such as a changing climate, food insecurity and sovereignty as well as the loss of biodiversity, in and around the peri-urban rural landscapes of our cities and towns.