2026 Morven in Summer

This class will explore how nature and business intersect—developing real-world sustainable business models rooted in the land itself. Can we create profitable, sustainable ventures that restore ecosystems? How do we balance commercial opportunities with responsible land use? What does business look like when it works with nature instead of against it?

This hands-on, place-based course uses the estate’s forests, fields, and working landscapes as a living laboratory to explore business models that create value by preserving, rather than extracting, natural resources.

Course counts for the Global Commerce and Society track in the Commerce School, Environmental Thought & Practice, Global Studies, and the General Business Minor.

This course looks at the production and consumption of food in a political context. We will explore legislation, regulation, and other policies that affect the food system and examine their implications for the environment, public health and democratic politics. We will look closely at controversies over agricultural subsidies, labeling requirements, farming practices, food safety, advertising and education.

Course counts for Politics, Environmental Thought & Practice, and Global Studies.

In this practice-based course, students will reexamine relations to their environment and generate strategies for a new environmental ethics that calls a human-centered world into question. Through reading, conversing, and moving, students consider how somatic and artistic practices might shift ecological understandings. Students will ask questions of and through modes of perception and experiment with an expanding empathy to enact new relations.

Course counts for the Artistic, Interpretive, & Philosophical Inquiry discipline.

This class will explore sounds of the natural world, joining an ongoing project called “Morven Soundscapes”. A time of dramatic annual change, the late spring and early summer is a terrific time to study sound and sustainability in Virginia. Students will use provided sound field kits and learn software for analyzing and interpreting their own recorded sounds. Students will learn about ecoacoustics theory and principles of sustainability identified through sound. We will explore biophonic and geophonic sounds, and study human-nature interaction in this vast and diverse landscape. This class will meet at UVA’s Morven Sustainability Lab.

Course counts for Music, Environmental Thought & Practice, and Computer Science.

Elizabeth K. Meyer, Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture and Faculty Director of the Morven Sustainability Lab, will lead this course as a deep dive into Morven's past, present, and future through the lens of cultural ecology.