MESH Grassroots

Lecture: A Quiet Revolution: The Work of The Nature Institute

Ryan Shea (Nature Institute, MESH)

November 12, 2026 | 5.45 – 7.15 (CET) | Online Lectue via Zoom 

For registration, please click here 
 

Founded in 1998 by Craig Holdrege, Henrike Holdrege, and Stephen Talbott in the Hudson River Valley of upstate New York, The Nature Institute is a small, non-profit research and adult education organization dedicated to practicing and sharing a delicate, yet rigorous, phenomenology of nature. As the mission statement says, "we seek ways of knowing and doing that are fashioned after nature's own wholeness. Science becomes a participatory dialogue with nature, wherein each phenomenon finds its unique, contextual expression." This talk will lay out the founding impulse, the development, and the current work of this institute, which Craig Holdrege described as "a quiet revolution." As we do not receive government funding, and are not affiliated with any academic institution, this talk will be of particular interest for those wishing to work in a similar sector.

Ryan Shea is a doctoral researcher at MESH, University of Cologne. His research seeks to develop the practice of contemplative ecology, focusing on plants and insects. His work is informed by the tradition of Goethean transformative phenomenology — especially the work of Craig Holdrege, Mark Riegner, Henri Bortoft, Jochen Bockemühl, and Andreas Suchantke — which develops new ways of seeing that allow the whole to be directly experienced in and through the part. For this tradition, one does not look for the integral wholeness of an ecosystem only in high-level laws, ecological systems theory models, and mathematical abstractions, but also seeks to encounter the wholeness of a habitat in and through the way it comes to expressive manifestation in the milkweed and then differently in and through the monarch butterfly. The title of his project is “A Goethean Phenomenological Ecology of Plants and Insects.”