The Center for Humans & Nature is an ideas hub. Humans & Nature Press shares ideas that build community and inspire action. Humans & Nature Farm is a place where ideas take root. The Center is a place to experience human connection with nature and consider our responsibilities to the whole community of life. Forty miles north of Chicago, the Center is home to breathtakingly beautiful prairie, savanna, wetland, woodland, ravine, and riparian ecosystems. Strachan Donnelley, the Center’s founder, spent his formative years within this landscape, both experiencing the world around him and trying to understand the human place within it. The land is the ancestral homelands of the Council of Three Fires—the Potawatomi, Ojibwa, and Ottawa—as well as the Kickapoo, Sioux, Peoria, Miami, Sauk, Menominee, Ho-Chunk, Meskwaki, and other Native Peoples. We recognize and celebrate the unbreakable ties to this land for Indigenous Peoples past, present, and future. We are committed to listening deeply to our Indigenous colleagues who carry knowledge about human relationships with this land.

The insights of scientific and empirical modes of knowing are indispensable for understanding and responding to our contemporary environmental crisis. So also, we will need environmental approaches, such as law, economics, and technology. We recall, too, that other cognitive ways of knowing are manifest in culturally diverse pathways that treasure emotional intelligence and affective insight. What is especially noteworthy is traditional environmental knowledge found among Indigenous peoples that have both observational and affective components. Indigenous people often speak of the natural world as filled with kin relationships requiring reciprocity and gratitude. Science-that-sees-the-whole is beginning to appreciate these other ways of knowing without giving over its foundational empirical approach. In addition, there is a growing appreciation for the multiple “intelligences” in the world. This conference aimed to explore some of those intelligences from plants and animals, to trees and forests, to fish and birds. It recognized the value of Indigenous, artistic, and modern ecological ways of knowing in which organic interconnectivity is acknowledged and affirmed.

The Marginalian is a record of Maria Popova’s reading and reckoning with humanity’s search for meaning: sometimes through science and philosophy, sometimes through poetry and children’s books, always through the lens of wonder. Founded in 2006 as an email to seven friends under the outgrown name Brain Pickings, and since included in the Library of Congress permanent web archive of culturally valuable materials, it remains a one-woman labor of love animated by the ultimate question that binds all life.

After 60 years in southern New York, Betsey Crawford took off in an RV to have adventures. A landscape designer and environmental activist, she now roams the west-from the Mexican border to Alaska-hiking and taking photographs, especially of wildflowers. She posts photos and celebrates nature, beauty, wildness, and spirit on her website.

UNITY EARTH is a global network on a mission to accelerate the realization of unity and peace on Earth. Inspired by the world’s wisdom traditions and born out of the desire to meet global-sized challenges with global-sized solutions, the network is built to amplify the reach and impact of peace-aligned organizations and individuals. UNITY EARTH’s programs and activities focus at the intersection of spirituality, science, technology, transformative practices, and the arts, to engage people across cultures, generations, and geographical boundaries. UNITY EARTH grows community by sharing stories and experiences to create a new story for humanity.