Welcome to our website! We hope you will be led by this website to fresh and radical perspectives on nature, science, and technology..

Please Visit our Calendar of Events to review the 2012 spring program including
Mathematics Alive! March 16-18 at The Nature Institute

In Context #26 is now available online.
Click here.

Math

Unlearn everything you once knew about genes! It hasn't hit the public consciousness yet, but the "epigenetic revolution" is radically transforming scientists' thinking about genes and their relation to the organism as a whole. It makes much more sense, researchers have been discovering, to say that the whole organism is in charge of its genes, than to put it the other way around. For an in-depth survey of the stunningly rapid developments in our understanding of molecular biology, see the continuing series of articles by Steve Talbott entitled, On Making the Genome Whole.

What Does it Mean to be a Sloth? This article by Craig Holdrege paints a vivid picture of the sloth — a remarkable animal that expresses slowness in so many of its characteristics and even slows down processes in the rain forest in which it lives. Originally published in 1998, this article, can now be read in revised form on our website. Enjoy getting to know this remarkable creature. And maybe it will even help you slow down in our hectic times! Click here.

A Book from Nature Institute Staff "Craig Holdrege and Steve Talbott's analysis of genetic engineering is the smartest, most original, and most compelling I have seen anywhere, in journalism or academia." (Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma) Published by the University Press of Kentucky, Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering is in the Press' "Culture of the Land" series, whose editorial advisors include Wendell Berry, Bill McKibben, Wes Jackson, Vandana Shiva, and others. As Sheldon Krimsky (Urban and Environmental Policy and Planning, Tufts University) describes the book, "The authors offer a refreshing style of scientific interpretation and have brought the discussion of the issues to a new level by making excellent use of current scientific findings that disclose how genes operate in vivo and by drawing on bioethical discussions." To find out more about this book or to order it, click here.

The Work of Martin Wagenschein: The Nature Institute is translating some of the writings of the German science educator and physicist Martin Wagenschein. To read about Wagenschein and to access the translations we have done so far, click here.

How Shall We Live? The way we experience ourselves in the world - our habits of perception and the relation between our sense of Self and sense of the Other - are decisively important for everything from the achievement of a truly adequate science to the restoration of social health to the establishment of an environmentally responsible ethics. Human progress in all fields depends upon how we engage the phenomena around us. This is why the book Being on Earth: Practice In Tending the Appearances, a full-text, online document, is so important. Written by physicist Georg Maier, the late philosopher Ronald Brady, and the late physicist Stephen Edelglass, it explores what it means for us to be on earth as knowers, as participants in earth's various ecological settings, and in company with one another. The book breaks down the barriers between fact and value, between science and aesthetics.

Being on Earth is now also available as a 196-page softcover paperback from Logos Verlag in Berlin. The price is 40.5 euros (approximately 63 US dollars). You can order the book over the internet by clicking here.

A thought-provoking publication The Giraffe's Long Neck: From Evolutionary Fable to Whole Organism by Craig Holdrege A fresh look at the giraffe and evolution. To find out more about this book, click here.

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