UVA Morven Sustainability Lab

Morven Logo

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.