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 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.

In this 10-day practice-based course, we will critically reflect on how we move through, in, and with our environments and develop strategies for activating an ecological conscience that challenges a human-centered worldview. Through collective reading and writing exercises, embodied and perceptual practices, and reflective dialogue, we will explore how somatic and artistic approaches have shaped—and can continue to shape—our ecological understanding. By the end of the course, we will create personal and group practices in collaboration with Morven —its land, more than human inhabitants, and layered histories—that rehearse new ways of living with precarity on a damaged planet.

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

Course is co-taught by Professor Elizabeth K. Meyer, Morven Sustainability Lab Faculty Director, and Michael Geffel, Practitioner Fellow, UVA Environmental Institute

Discover the early-stage practices of regenerating ecosystems at Morven. Through fieldwork exercises and close looking (multi-sensory recordings, photo-sampling, 1:1 hand drawings, and temporary installations), students will document several transects along the “ancient road” trace through Morven. Final projects range from a field guide of Morven’s rural cultural ecologies (fields, hedgerows & croplands in transition to regenerative agriculture) to designed experiments in adaptive land management.

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.