The Centre intends to make a significant contribution, on levels that range from the local to the global, towards reaching new understandings of our relationship with the natural world and in ways that embrace diversity, practice inclusivity and promote dialogue.

• It provides important opportunities for cross-fertilisation between art forms and disciplines, and forges new relationships between the arts and sciences; interdependent ways of looking at the natural world. Its uniqueness lies in this unifying concept, rather than on any model of existing gallery, arts complex or sculpture park.
  

Nature is only the name given to a certain contemporary state of science. Catherine Larrière

When overlaying environmental history with the history of art, there exists a striking correlation between changes in the physical environment and the emergence of new forms and images. Several significant developments in art appear to coincide with periods characterised by environmental stress.

• Since the Sixties, a time of social and political upheaval, artists and designers, writers, composers, filmmakers, choreographers and performers have become increasingly engaged in a critical reassessment of the relationship between society and nature, and been influenced by other cultures, religions, philosophical concepts and the scientific and technological revolution.

• Over the past decade, forms of art practice which perpetuate exalted individualism and the myth of nature unspoiled by human presence have become increasingly set-aside in order to reach towards new understandings of our relationship with nature which involves interaction and linking.

Old modernist patterns of alienation and confrontation give way to new ones of mutualism and the development of an active and practical dialogue with the environment. Suzi Gablik

The start of a new Millennium, marked by a convergence of concern over species depletion, new genetic technologies, BSE, foot and mouth and AIDS epidemics, global warming, over-population, poverty, prejudice, waste, pollution and the need to reassess farming practice in Britain all suggest the urgent need to set up a Centre to look anew at the relationship through the arts of our own time.