The Center for Humans & Nature is an ideas hub exploring in-depth and diverse perspectives about what it means to be human in an interconnected world. The Center is home to Humans & Nature Press, which shares ideas that build community and inspire action, and Humans & Nature Farm, a place where ideas take root and people experience human connection with nature while considering our responsibilities to the whole community of life. Founded by Strachan Donnelley, who spent his formative years experiencing the world around him and trying to understand the human place within it, the Center’s home is located forty miles north of Chicago and encompasses breathtakingly beautiful prairie, savanna, wetland, woodland, ravine, and riparian ecosystems. 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. The Center recognizes and celebrates the unbreakable ties to this land for Indigenous Peoples past, present, and future, and is committed to listening deeply to Indigenous colleagues who carry knowledge about human relationships with this land.
Why it matters: The Center for Humans & Nature integrates philosophical inquiry with embodied experience, demonstrating that understanding what it means to be human in an interconnected world requires engaging both mind and body within actual ecosystems. By rooting its ideas hub within prairie, savanna, wetland, woodland, and riparian landscapes, the Center proves that questions about human responsibility to the whole community of life are best explored not in abstraction but in direct relationship with the more-than-human world. The Center’s commitment to listening deeply to Indigenous colleagues honors the reality that understanding our place within nature isn’t a new question requiring invention but ancient wisdom requiring humility and attention to those who never lost their unbreakable ties to land.