Videos

From time to time we record the presentations of Nature Institute staff and guest speakers, as well as occasional conversations and interviews. All our videos are below. If you'd like to subscribe and be notified when we post new ones, you can do so on our YouTube channel as well as by joining our mailing list. Our YouTube channel also has a playlist with additional videos related to Goethean phenomenology.

The Wisdom of Plants — a talk by Craig Holdrege (2024)

In this talk at the institute, Craig Holdrege honors Earth Day with a presentation revealing some of the remarkable qualities of the plant world, the “mantle of the earth.” Here we have synced the recorded audio of the talk with a slide show of images that Craig used.

Gestures in the Work of Artist Ernst Barlach — a talk by Henrike Holdrege (2022)
This lecture and slideshow highlights some of the remarkable art produced by Ernst Barlach (1870–1938), a German sculptor, visual artist, and playwright. Against the backdrop of a challenging political and social scene in Germany, Barlach brought manifold features of human inwardness and experience to concrete and vivid expression in his works. For this he was both celebrated and persecuted. Henrike weaves together parts of his biography, journal entries, and images of his sculptures in this unique presentation.

Gestures of a Life — a talk by Stephen L. Talbott (2021)
For more than 20 years, our senior researcher — Steve Talbott — has been building a body of work that illuminates natural phenomena and calls for a qualitative approach to examining organisms. In this talk, given at the Institute in November, 2021, Steve describes his theme as an offering of “notes from desperately unsatisfactory encounters with the living interior of self and world, along with intimations of their meaning for science.”

Toward a Thought-Full Teleology — On June 29, 2021, Steve Talbott spoke at a two-day online conference of the Linnean Society of London, “Evolution ‘On Purpose’: Teleonomy in Living Systems.” Steve noted the rapidly growing willingness within some biological and philosophical circles to think of organisms in terms of agency and purposiveness, yet how far this way of thinking is from the mainstream. What is widely ignored is the fact that our conscious purposes are inseparable from the very evident purposiveness of our unconscious activity, all the way down to the gene expression in our cells. View his talk and notes about it here.

Goethe and the Evolution of Science — a talk by Craig Holdrege (2021)
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832) was both creative artist and scientist. He viewed and practiced science as a participatory endeavor — an evolving dialogue between the human being and nature. He believed the human being needs to develop ever more refined capacities to do justice to the deeper nature of nature. In this talk, Craig Holdrege presents key features of the Goethean approach to science, based on Goethe’s own research, and discuss its relevance for the present and future.
Organized by Dartington Trust’s Schumacher College in collaboration with the Field Centre. (View other speakers in this series of Holistic Science Online Talks.)

About The Nature Institute's Mission — In this short video, Craig Holdrege, the executive director of The Nature Institute, asks the fundamental question “Do we see the world?” The mission of the institute is to cultivate that seeing and to develop practices to transform our sensibilities and thinking in order to understand the living character of the world.

Giving Living Beings a Voice — a talk by Craig Holdrege (2017)
Speaking at a conference on “Synthetic Biology,” a discipline in which organisms are viewed as machine-like entities that we can manipulate with engineering precision, Craig asks: What might organisms themselves have to say about such a project?

The Work of Franz Marc: Expressing the Being of Animals — a talk by Craig Holdrege (2017)
With the aid of slides, Craig reflects upon the life and work of the Expressionist painter Franz Marc. Through the artist’s life, words, and works, Craig shows the loving attention with which Marc was able to enter into, and profoundly express, the life of animals.

Where Does an Animal End? The American Bison — a talk by Craig Holdrege (2018)
Craig shares the fruits of his many years of research into this fascinating animal: its physical constitution, its relationship to its ecosystem, its life as an individual and as part of a herd, and its relationship to the Native Americans. Through a close look at the American Bison, Craig sheds light on the boundaries of what makes an animal an animal, and how the demarcations aren’t as clear as we might expect.

The Science and Art of Composting — an interview with Bruno Follador (2018)
Bruno Follador, the former director of The Nature Institute’s Living Soils project, speaks about his work with composting — learning the language of a landscape through what is expressed in the compost and searching for the questions that can bring him into ever greater relationship to nature and the world.

Where Do We Come From? The Question of Origins and Ancestors in Evolution — a talk by Craig Holdrege (2017)
In this talk (with slides), Craig examines the widespread and perhaps overly simplified belief in a linear story of human ancestry. What emerges in its place is the importance of “the whole story” — a story that turns out to be complex and surprising.

Special Feature:
On Screens and Children

Reality-Based Education in a Hyperreal Culture — a talk by Craig Holdrege (2014)
Today we can come to know vast amounts about life on earth by watching nature videos. But how does that knowledge differ from first-hand experience of nature? In this short article, Craig shares a fox video and describes what the video misses — the perception of the deeper rootedness of a phenomenon, what the philosopher Albert Borgman called “commanding presences.”