Morven Sustainability Lab Releases 10-Year Strategic Action Plan
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This announcement includes selected excerpts from the MSL Faculty Director’s letter to the UVA community and neighbors, published in the Morven Sustainability Lab’s 10-Year Strategic Action Plan.
The University of Virginia’s Morven Sustainability Lab (MSL)—directed by Elizabeth K. Meyer, Merrill D. Peterson Professor of Landscape Architecture—has released its first 10-Year Strategic Action Plan, presenting a bold and comprehensive vision for Morven as UVA’s Experimental and Experiential Grounds. Developed over two years of collaboration among faculty, students, staff, and community partners, the plan outlines a new era of place-based sustainability, transdisciplinary research, and immersive learning.
In her introductory letter, Meyer reflects on the profound significance of the process itself. “The process of collaborating on this ten-year strategic action plan for the Morven Sustainability Lab has been nothing short of a joy,” she writes. With fifty years of experience as a landscape architect and more than three decades on the UVA School of Architecture faculty, she calls this effort “as invigorating, meaningful, and challenging” as any in her career.
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| Elizabeth K. Meyer, MSL Inaugural Faculty Director. Photo: Tom Daly | |
Meyer notes that Morven’s landscape—its history, its vulnerabilities, and its central role in UVA’s broader ecological context—informed the development of the Strategic Action Plan. Her reflections on the site’s long environmental memory and its exposure to contemporary climate pressures underscored the need for a coordinated, place-based approach to sustainability. This understanding shapes the plan’s vision for Morven as a site where research, teaching, and practice converge to meet the challenges of a rapidly changing climate.
Grounded in this perspective, MSL's Strategic Action Plan outlines a decade of work centered on regenerative land stewardship, cross-disciplinary collaboration, transformational experiential learning, and innovative research rooted in place-based sustainability and cultural landscape stewardship. By integrating traditional land practices with new methods for addressing climate change, biodiversity loss, and food system challenges in the Virginia Piedmont, the plan positions Morven as a leading site for imagining and testing sustainable futures.
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Meyer describes Morven’s diverse lands as “a living landscape classroom, laboratory, and sanctuary,” a place where students, faculty, staff, visiting scholars, and local partners can explore, discover, and co-create more enduring and just models of multispecies living. She emphasizes that meaningful sustainability work must reach beyond disciplinary boundaries: “Sustainability requires more than scientists, designers, and engineers. The University’s many academic disciplines… are needed to address the complexity of contemporary climate change.”
For Meyer, this vision represents the fruition of a long-held aspiration. She notes that “there are few peri-urban agricultural landscapes of this scale, biodiversity, and historic significance available for academic purposes at our peer institutions.” The plan positions Morven as a site where UVA’s broad intellectual expertise and the deep local knowledge of community partners converge to address urgent socio-ecological challenges, including climate change, food insecurity and sovereignty, biodiversity loss, and the transformation of rural landscapes.
Meyer characterizes the Strategic Action Plan as both a milestone and an invitation. “Fueled by passion, patience, and persistence,” she writes, “this strategic action plan is an invitation to partner with us… in what we know as Morven: UVA’s twenty-first-century Experimental and Experiential Grounds.”
Read Morven Sustainability Lab's 10-year Strategic Action Plan:
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Contributors
Elizabeth K. Meyer, MSL Inaugural Faculty Director*
Manuel Lerdau, MSL Research Director**
Rebecca Deeds, MSL Program Director***
Maryellen Dolan, Director, Real Estate Asset Management, UVA Foundation
Andres Clarens, Professor, Civil and Environmental Engineering**
Phoebe Crisman, Professor, Architecture**
Lila Donahue, Morven Student Design Assistant
Paul Freedman, Director, Environmental Thought and Practice Major**
Fiona Flynn, MSL Morven Kitchen Garden Manager
Jonah Fogel, Program Manager of Research Development + Education, UVA Environmental Institute**
Taylor Goff, MSL Operations and Outreach Manager
Genevieve Keller, Lecturer, Historic Preservation**
Garrick Louis, Professor, Engineering + Society; Systems + Information Engineering**
Justin Mallory, Morven Asset Management, UVA Foundation***
Louis Nelson, Vice Provost for Academic Outreach
Elton Oliver, Morven Estate Manager Emeritus, UVA Foundation***
Margot Rogers, former Vice President for Strategic Initiatives, Office of the President
Gino Stickley, MSL Program and Administrative Coordinator
Theo Teichman, MSL Research Associate
Andrea Trimble, UVA Sustainability Director**
Evans Van Liew, MSL Event and Venues Coordinator
Madhura Vaze, MSL Research Assistant
*MSL Advisory Committee Chair
**MSL Advisory Committee Member
***MSL Advisory Committee, Ex Officio
