Climate programs can arrive carrying the vocabulary of crisis: emissions, resilience, mitigation, adaptation, loss. Duke Farms is trying something different on Sept. 19. For one Saturday, the Hillsborough property will make room for the other reasons people pay attention to the natural world in the first place — beauty, curiosity, music, wildlife and a story worth following.
Duke Farms Presents: Wild by Nature is a five-hour program featuring Grammy-nominated harpist Brandee Younger, documentary filmmaker Penny Lane and Jad Abumrad, the creator of Radiolab, More Perfect and Dolly Parton’s America. The event runs from 10 a.m. to 3:15 p.m. and is designed around the premise that climate action requires more than solutions alone. It also requires connection and reasons to care.
That premise is visible in the schedule. The morning belongs first to music. Younger will perform live beginning at 10:15 a.m., then join Abumrad for a conversation about music, creativity and possibility. Younger, a 2025 Doris Duke Artist, has spent her career expanding the role of the harp in jazz and contemporary music, drawing from jazz, classical, soul and funk traditions while pushing an instrument often treated as delicate or ornamental into a much broader musical vocabulary.
Duke Farms is a particularly fitting place for that conversation. The 2,700-acre property is operated as a center of the Doris Duke Foundation, with conservation, sustainability, research and public engagement built into its mission. Wild by Nature uses that landscape not simply as a backdrop, but as part of the argument: environmental concern becomes easier to understand when people have something tangible to notice, hear and remember.
Lunch follows the performance, with a local and seasonal meal prepared by Chef Lauren. Then the program shifts from live music to one of the stranger and more beloved wildlife stories New York City has produced in recent years.
At 2 p.m., Lane joins Abumrad for clips from Wild Inside, her 2026 documentary about Flaco, the Eurasian eagle-owl who escaped from the Central Park Zoo in 2023 and survived in Manhattan after a lifetime in captivity. The owl became a citywide fixation as New Yorkers tracked him across rooftops, trees and water towers. Lane’s film uses that unlikely urban odyssey to explore wildness, freedom, resilience and the peculiar emotional force of watching an animal live outside the boundaries people had built for it.
There is a useful symmetry in pairing Younger and Lane. One program asks what happens when an artist expands the expected range of an instrument; the other asks what happens when an animal crosses the expected boundary between captivity and the wild. Abumrad, whose work has long mixed reporting, sound, science, philosophy and narrative, serves as the connective tissue between the two.
That makes Wild by Nature less of a conventional climate seminar than a deliberately assembled day of attention. The subject is still the relationship between people and nature, but the route into it is not a presentation deck. It is a harp performance, a shared meal, a filmmaker, an owl and the questions that follow when all of those things are placed in the same room.
The scale is intentionally limited. Duke Farms says only 100 tickets are available. Admission is $150 per person and includes the full program, lunch and a one-year Duke Farms Explorer membership. Fifty tickets also include round-trip bus transportation from New York City at no additional cost, selected during registration.
For an institution built around conservation, that may be the most interesting part of the experiment. Wild by Nature does not ask visitors to begin with obligation. It asks them to begin by paying attention. Sometimes the path toward caring about a landscape, a species or a larger environmental problem starts there: with something beautiful enough, strange enough or human enough to make people look up.
Event Details
| What | Duke Farms Presents: Wild by Nature |
|---|---|
| When | Saturday, Sept. 19, 2026, 10 a.m.–3:15 p.m. |
| Where | Duke Farms, 1112 Dukes Parkway West, Hillsborough Township, NJ 08844 |
| Tickets | $150 per person; only 100 tickets are available |
| Includes | Full program, seasonal lunch and a one-year Duke Farms Explorer membership |
| Also | Fifty tickets include round-trip bus transportation from New York City at no additional cost |
| Calendar | Add event to calendar |
SOURCE NOTES
• Duke Farms — Wild by Nature event listing
• Doris Duke Foundation — Brandee Younger artist profile
• Jad Abumrad — Radio projects and biography
• IFC Center — Wild Inside film information
• Duke Farms — About Duke Farms / conservation mission
Official information and listings verified against public pages on September 7, 2026. Observational passages are based on the reporter's advance dispatch. Event details are subject to change; check organizers before travel.