Center for Humans and Nature

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The Center for Humans and Nature is a nonprofit, non-partisan organization with a mission to explore and promote human responsibilities in relation to nature. [1] The organization is headquartered in Libertyville, Illinois. [2]

Contents

History

The organization was founded in 2003 [3] by Strachan Donnelley, Ph.D. [4] a philosopher and ethicist who began his career at the Hastings Center. [5]

Donnelley founded the Center to explore the role of ethical thinking—based in an environmental ethics—for informing individual and political decision-making. [6]

About the Center for Humans and Nature

The Center provides in-depth and diverse perspectives about what it means to be human in an interconnected world. [7]

Contributors and Editorial Fellows for the Center’s publications and projects have included philosophers, biologists, ecologists, lawyers, political scientists, anthropologists, artists, poets, and economists.” [8]

The Center has co-hosted events with the Chicago Botanic Garden, Lincoln Park Zoo, Peggy Notebaert Nature Museum, School of the Art Institute of Chicago, American Museum of Natural History, Western Colorado University, Wisconsin Public Radio, Point Reyes Books, and New School at Commonweal. The Center has also partnered with the nationally syndicated public radio show To the Best of Our Knowledge on a podcast series. [9] Event and podcast participants have included Robin Wall Kimmerer, David Abram, Jane Goodall, Kathleen Dean Moore, Sharon Blackie, Enrique Salmon, Suzanne Simard, Gary Paul Nabhan, and Julian Agyeman. [10]

Publications and Media

The Center for Humans and Nature publishes stories and ideas online and in print that explore our relationships and responsibilities to nature and provide in-depth and diverse perspectives related to arts, humanity, and nature.

Stories & Ideas

The Center for Humans and Nature's online digital publications are housed under Stories & Ideas. These “Stories & Ideas” are featured in a diversity of forms—essays, art, interviews, poems, reviews, and videos—with a variety of contributors sharing their diverse perspectives on themes such as: Animals & Plants, Care, Climate Change, Community, Cosmos, Culture, Healing, Justice, Land & Water, Language, Practice, Reciprocity, Sacred, Sovereignty, and Urban Nature. [11]

Contributors have included Rebecca Solnit, adrienne maree brown, Tommy Orange, Mary Midgley, David Sloan Wilson, Benjamin Barber, Robin Kimmerer, David Abram, Maude Barlow, Herman Daly, Bill McKibben, Sharon Olds, Nalini Nadkarni, Hans Joachim Schellnhuber, Vandana Shiva, and James Gustave Speth, among others. [12]

Minding Nature

The Center publishes Minding Nature, [13] formerly a tri-annual journal (2008–2021), and currently an annual journal that “explores ecological responsibilities, values, and practices.”

Center for Humans and Nature Press

The Center for Humans and Nature Press is the Center's independent publishing wing—exploring themes of human interconnection with nature and human responsibilities to the whole community of life. [14] The Center for Humans and Nature Press print publications include the five-volume book series, Kinship: Belonging in a World Relations. [15] Edited by Gavin Van Horn, Robin Wall Kimmerer, and John Hausdoerffer, Kinship is a five-book anthology that explores humanity's deep interconnections with the living world. The five Kinship volumes—Planet, Place, Partners, Persons, Practice—offer essays, interviews, poetry, and stories that highlight the interdependence that exists between humans and nonhuman beings. The Kinship book series is part of a larger project that also includes the Making Kin online art exhibition [16] and the Kinship with the More-Than–Human World podcast in partnership with To the Best of Our Knowledge. [17]

Related Research Articles

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Donna Haraway Scholar in the field of science and technology studies

Donna J. Haraway is an American Professor Emerita in the History of Consciousness Department and Feminist Studies Department at the University of California, Santa Cruz, United States. She is a prominent scholar in the field of science and technology studies, described in the early 1990s as a "feminist and postmodernist". Haraway is the author of numerous foundational books and essays that bring together questions of science and feminism, such as "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century" (1985) and "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective" (1988). Additionally, for her contributions to the intersection of information technology and feminist theory, Haraway is widely cited in works related to Human-Computer Interaction (HCI). Her Situated Knowledges and Cyborg Manifesto publications in particular, have sparked discussion within the HCI community regarding framing the positionality from which research and systems are designed. She is also a leading scholar in contemporary ecofeminism, associated with post-humanism and new materialism movements. Her work criticizes anthropocentrism, emphasizes the self-organizing powers of nonhuman processes, and explores dissonant relations between those processes and cultural practices, rethinking sources of ethics. Haraway criticizes the Anthropocene because it generalizes us as a species. However, she also recognizes the importance of it recognizing humans as key agents. Haraway prefers the term Capitalocene which defines capitalism's relentless imperatives to expand itself and grow, but she does not like the theme of irreversible destruction in both the Anthropocene and Capitalocene.

Kinship Human relationship term; web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of most humans in most societies; form of social connection

In anthropology, kinship is the web of social relationships that form an important part of the lives of all humans in all societies, although its exact meanings even within this discipline are often debated. Anthropologist Robin Fox says that the study of kinship is the study of what humans do with these basic facts of life – mating, gestation, parenthood, socialization, siblingship etc. Human society is unique, he argues, in that we are "working with the same raw material as exists in the animal world, but [we] can conceptualize and categorize it to serve social ends." These social ends include the socialization of children and the formation of basic economic, political and religious groups.

Hans Jonas was a German-born American Jewish philosopher, from 1955 to 1976 the Alvin Johnson Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York City.

Mary Midgley British philosopher

Mary Beatrice Midgley was a British philosopher. A senior lecturer in philosophy at Newcastle University, she was known for her work on science, ethics and animal rights. She wrote her first book, Beast And Man (1978), when she was in her fifties, and went on to write over 15 more, including Animals and Why They Matter (1983), Wickedness (1984), The Ethical Primate (1994), Evolution as a Religion (1985), and Science as Salvation (1992). She was awarded honorary doctorates by Durham and Newcastle universities. Her autobiography, The Owl of Minerva, was published in 2005.

Spiritual ecology is an emerging field in religion, conservation, and academia recognizing that there is a spiritual facet to all issues related to conservation, environmentalism, and earth stewardship. Proponents of Spiritual Ecology assert a need for contemporary conservation work to include spiritual elements and for contemporary religion and spirituality to include awareness of and engagement in ecological issues.

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The Hastings Center

The Hastings Center is an independent, nonpartisan bioethics research institute and think tank based in Garrison, New York. It was instrumental in establishing the field of bioethics and is among the most prestigious bioethics and health policy institutes in the world.

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David Abram is an American ecologist and philosopher best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2010) and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (1996), for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Abram is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE); his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as the online magazine Emergence, Orion, Environmental Ethics, Parabola, Tikkun and The Ecologist, as well as in numerous academic anthologies.

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<i>Social Bonding and Nurture Kinship</i>

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<i>Braiding Sweetgrass</i> 2013 nonfiction book by Robin Wall Kimmerer

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<i>The Universal Kinship</i> 1906 book by J. Howard Moore

The Universal Kinship is a 1906 book by American zoologist, philosopher, educator and socialist J. Howard Moore. In the book, Moore advocated for a secular sentiocentric philosophy, called the Universal Kinship, which mandated the ethical consideration and treatment of all sentient beings based on Darwinian principles of shared evolutionary kinship, and a universal application of the Golden Rule; a direct challenge to anthropocentric hierarchies and ethics. The book was endorsed by Henry S. Salt, Mark Twain and Jack London, Eugene V. Debs and Mona Caird. Moore expanded on his ideas in The New Ethics, published in 1907.

References

  1. "Paid Notice: Deaths DONNELLEY, STRACHAN, PH.D." The New York Times. 2008-07-15.
  2. "About The Center for Humans and Nature". Center for Humans & Nature.
  3. Donnelley, Strachan. "Evolutionary Biology, Philosophy of Nature, Ethics of Responsibility". Private Landowner Network.
  4. Jensen, Trevor (2008-07-16). "Strachan Donnelley:1942 – 2008". Chicago Tribune.
  5. "Strachan Donnelley Remembered; Great Lawn at Center Named in His Honor". The Hastings Center. Archived from the original on 2014-04-26.
  6. "Putting ethical thinking at the core of decision-making". Research Institute for Managing Sustainability.
  7. "About the Center for Humans and Nature". Center for Humans & Nature.
  8. "Our People". Center for Humans & Nature.
  9. "Kinship with the More-Than-Human World". To the Best of Our Knowledge.
  10. "Our People". Center for Humans & Nature.
  11. "Stories & Ideas". Center for Humans and Nature.
  12. "Contributors". Center for Humans & Nature.
  13. "Minding Nature". Center for Humans & Nature.
  14. "Center for Humans and Nature Press". Center for Humans & Nature.
  15. "Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations". Center for Humans and Nature.
  16. "Making Kin". Center for Humans and Nature.
  17. "Kinship with the More-Than-Human World". To the Best of Our Knowledge.