The Nature Institute: Growing Holistic Science

by John Beck

On a gray day last November we met with Craig Holdrege, director and senior researcher of The Nature Institute in Ghent, NY, to talk about the institute’s plans for expansion. Its modest building in upstate New York, between the Hudson River and the Berkshire mountains and Massachusetts, has been home to what the website (natureinstitute.org) describes without false modesty as “incisive and thoughtful research studies, publications, and education programs.” If physical heft and force of consciousness are often overbalanced toward glass and concrete in today’s universities, The Nature Institute has it the other way around. Acutely aware of the best contemporary thinking in natural and life sciences and technology, the institute’s researches seek balance. The mission statement is concise:

“Nature around us is whole and interconnected. Though we are part of nature, we do not yet fathom her depths, and our actions do not embody her wisdom. A fundamental shift in our way of viewing the world is necessary if we would contribute to nature’s unity rather than dissolution. At The Nature Institute, we develop new qualitative and holistic approaches to seeing and understanding nature and technology. Through research, publications, and educational programs we work to create a new paradigm that embraces nature’s wisdom in shaping a sustainable and healthy future.”

Just the previous evening Johannes Kühl, leader of the Natural Science Section at the Goetheanum in Switzerland, had spoken to a crowd packed, sitting and standing, into the institute’s small meeting room. With sufficient support—$225,000 of which half has been raised,—there will be a new wing added with a larger meeting and seminar room, and added lab and research/office rooms below. Room to grow, appropriate to a thriving initiative.

“The Nature Institute’s methodology is inspired by integrative thinkers and scientists, such as Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Rudolf Steiner, Owen Barfield and Kurt Goldstein. We develop ways of thinking and perception that integrate self-reflective and critical thought, imagination, and careful, detailed observation of nature’s phenomena. Goethe’s words stand as a motto for our efforts:

If we want to attain a living understanding of nature, we must become as flexible and mobile as nature herself.

“Biologist and Institute founder and director Craig Holdrege, senior researcher and publications’ editor Steve Talbott, associate researcher Henrike Holdrege, and affiliate researchers Michael D’Aleo, Johannes Wirz, and Ronald Brady (deceased) have authored books and articles while also speaking at conferences, leading workshops, training teachers, and lecturing widely.”

In a short conversation with Craig Holdrege it was possible to move quickly to core issues. His recent book with colleague Steve Talbott, Beyond Biotechnology: The Barren Promise of Genetic Engineering, is a great achievement, calmly taking up all the hype about genetic engineering and gently discarding it as the real science is clearly stated which geneticists know but corporate publicists never share. By the final chapter any open-minded person should be ready for the presentation of the receptive, dynamic, whole, and imaginative science launched by J.W. von Goethe two centuries ago and relaunched and expanded by Rudolf Steiner.

Henrike Holdrege joins us, and the conversation shifts to Steiner’s anthroposophy itself. She is keen to remind that “Goethean science” is not just another in the manypetaled blossom of initiatives from Steiner’s remarkable mind and heart. Rather, this strong training of skills most people would consider “artistic”—observation, impression, imagination, inspiration, intuition, expression, engagement—properly underlies and supports all the other “anthroposophical” undertakings. To work with these skills and raise them to the level of a delicate but strong objectivity—that is what allows great things to come forth from eurythmy, education, curative work and therapies, social interventions.

Indeed, there is even one prior step before the Goethean science, as Rudolf Steiner experienced in his own development. That is the awakening to conscious selfhood itself, and the inventory, experiencing, and thoughtful exercise of all the several powers of consciousness. I think, I feel, I act—become it thinks in me, it feels in me, it lives as intention in me.

The Holdreges had to run, to continue hosting their guest from the Goetheanum. We took pictures, inside and out, and carried a strong and resonant feeling that something near the green and growing tip of human culture and evolution was taking place here. For a sample of the institute’s latest work, please continue with “The Language of Organisms” by Steve Talbott on the next page.