Three decades of eco-cultural work. In each case the habitat came first: the ecology of a particular place was studied, inhabited, and then translated with collaborators into something a public could feel. Listed most recent first.
A talk on Earthling Theory and the provenance of human intelligence as natural history. The argument: human intelligence is not an internal human invention but an inheritance from seven million years of sustained relational engagement with every habitat on Earth. What AI cannot replicate is precisely the entangled, place-made part of us.
Leadership development already borrows its vocabulary from ecology: adaptation, resilience, emergence, systems. This program reconnected those metaphors to their source. Working with a cohort of practitioners, the sessions moved from the cosmological ground of relationality through Earthling Theory and into the practical question of what a leader perceives when ecological intelligence is restored.
A gathering of philosophers and practitioners working at the boundary of process thought, cognitive science, and ecology. Delivered Oika programming and tested Earthling Theory against an audience trained to press on it.
A nine-foot hollow wooden surfboard built by hand from a single Nantucket cedar, alone in a shack on the island, and documented as it goes. The board is an invitation. It draws people who would never come to a lecture into a conversation about the philosophy underneath the craft: where the tree grew, what the water does, and what it means to make a thing you will then use to enter a living system.
A guided walk through Nantucket's cobblestone streets that reads the town as geology. Each stone carries a history longer than the island, and the walk traces that continuity from glacial transport back through deep time and forward into the life of the place today. The first title in the Oika GO platform.
A series of web experiences that put Oika practice in the hand, on site. One branded universe, many individual titles, each grounded in the ecology of a specific place. Built so a walk, a shoreline, or a habitat can become a structured encounter rather than a scenic backdrop.
Ecological restoration and cultural revitalization treated as one act. Invasive phragmites is cleared and native cattail returned, while traditional weaving and mat-making are taught alongside the restoration. The plant is both the ecological subject and the cultural medium, so healing the marsh and carrying the knowledge forward happen in the same hours of work.
Eelgrass sequesters carbon from the water column and locally buffers ocean acidification, which matters directly to Nantucket's bay scallop fishery. Two sensors went into the harbor that summer. One was an oceanographic buoy measuring pH, nutrients, dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity, and chlorophyll. The other was an artist. Rita Leduc immersed herself in the eelgrass beds and collected visual data on the sensations of relationality she felt at different heights above the sea floor. The long-term value of the resulting artwork is algorithmically tied to the pH the buoy reads in real time, and proceeds from the inaugural sale are split three ways between artist, conservation sponsor, and Oika Research. The harbor's health and the human condition are made into one measurement.
The launch of BFL as an umbrella for the research, the practitioner network, and the media work, together with an introduction to Oika for people arriving at the framework for the first time.
Artificial intelligence arriving at scale is an occasion, not only a threat. The lecture proposes that what AI makes newly visible is the intelligence we already carry from Earth, and that art is the practice most capable of reactivating it.
Deployment and operation of a state-of-the-art oceanographic buoy taking continuous measurements of pH, nutrients, dissolved oxygen, temperature, salinity, and chlorophyll. The data serves eelgrass and bay scallop conservation, and from the first season it was built to be translated into public understanding rather than filed away.
A geo-locative audio experience that places Native ecological knowledge and contemporary scientific understanding on the same ground, unlocking as the listener moves through the actual landscape the stories describe.
A healing ceremony addressing addiction, suicide, and inherited trauma through traditional stomp dance. Feet etch a path into the ground, and the restoration of the community and the restoration of the land are performed as the same motion.
Ecological intelligence approached through science and direct experience, including Earth Story Walks that trace cosmic history through the Nantucket landscape, so that deep time is encountered in a specific moraine, bog, or shoreline rather than on a slide.
An ongoing podcast bridging research and public engagement, with episodes built around artists, scientists, and the island's own species and seasons.
Public lectures translating physics, astronomy, biology, ecology, and anthropology into cultural narrative, with the island itself as the recurring case study.
A gallery exhibition of work made through the Oika framework, including collaborations with island artists, showing how ecological intelligence changes what an artist notices and therefore what gets made.
A conference presentation examining how ecological and indigenous worldviews inform cultural communication, and locating the metacrisis in a crisis of intelligence rather than a crisis of information.
The first full public presentation of Earthling Theory, given as a natural history of story: narrative as something the planet does through us, developed across millions of years of habitat engagement.
A long art-science residency inside one of the most intensively studied forests in the world. Rather than illustrating the science, the work extended it: the forest's measured dynamics became the material of an artistic practice conducted on site over years, and the exhibition brought the resulting body of work to a public that would never read the data. Shown at Plymouth State University and in the New York exhibition Fragile Rainbow: Traversing Habitats.
A film documenting the residency from inside: what it looks like when an artist and an ecologist work the same forest at the same time without either one servicing the other.
Essays and publications that carried the Hubbard Brook work into print, testing whether a relational, phenomenological account of a forest can survive translation to the page.
An in-person course teaching artists to work from ecological intelligence rather than about ecology, taught in the dune, marsh, and kettle pond habitats of the Outer Cape.
Short films that read a single artwork through the Oika lens, tracing the relational and cosmic lineage running through an image that its maker may not have named. The series doubles as a teaching instrument: it shows the move being made rather than describing it.
Cosmic evolution told as a sequence of ecologies rather than a sequence of events. Light has an ecology, stars have an ecology, a planet wakes up, membranes coalesce. Released as short films and as a multi-part podcast series.
Three short films isolating the load-bearing ideas: how story moves through nature, how creativity is experienced as emergence, and how fractals work as the bridges that connect scales.
An extended workshop on what an economics grounded in ecological relationship would actually have to measure, followed by an experiment in whether distributed ledger technology can hold ecological value without distorting it.
The first sustained pilot of Oika curriculum with a community cohort, run in a working port city where the relationship between people, water, and economy is neither abstract nor comfortable.
Extended public dialogues that put Oika in contact with cognitive science, process philosophy, and psychology, and let it be tested by interlocutors who do not share its premises.
Virtual reality built on the premise that immersion can restore a perceptual relationship, not just simulate a place. In the Light of the Forest put viewers inside the light economy of a forest; the Cosmic Background Radiation Explorer made the oldest light in the universe something you could stand in.
A multi-site tour bringing Oika workshops and VR into working research stations, each session built around the ecology of that station rather than a portable curriculum. The field station network became the testing ground for what would later become the residency model.
Professional development workshops and festival programming that carried Oika into a Mediterranean context, and seeded the OikaKids strand with a collaborator working in geolocative digital art.
An experimental piece on divination, bone, and the long human practice of reading the natural world for guidance.
Doctoral research on transformative natural history learning, asking what has to happen for scientific cosmology to actually change how a person lives. Integrated creative practice projects into the research rather than treating them as outreach.
A talk and a board. Surfing is a cosmological practice performed by people who would not call it that, and a wooden surfboard is an argument you can paddle. The project used the craft to open the cosmology to an audience that arrived for the woodwork.
A film about the work and the life underneath it, tracing the path from working the water to reading the planet, and setting out why a story about the Earth has to be told from inside a particular relationship with it rather than from above.
A revival of hollow wooden surfboard building, including the Strip and Feather method. The boards put the forest and the ocean into one object and made the relationship between them legible to surfers, woodworkers, and the press. Covered by NPR, the Surfer's Journal, WoodenBoat, and others.
A documentary series embedding with working field scientists: herring gull research with Julie Ellis at Shoals Marine Lab, cave and bat ecology, and Anasazi rope-making in Chaco Canyon. Each episode was shot where the research happens, so the habitat sets the terms of the story.
A short film on the place of scientific thinking in public life, produced for the Center for Inquiry.
Coral reef ecology and climate communication, including a National Geographic segment on Paul Sikkel's and Donna Nemeth's Earthwatch research into fish parasites and reef conservation. Also produced the station's own films for visiting researchers and school groups, built so that arriving students met the reef through the science being done on it.
Documentation of long-term research into the ecological health and conservation of Grevy's zebra, conducted with the Samburu whose grazing lands and water the zebra share. The conservation question could not be separated from the pastoral economy around it, and the film was made accordingly.
Early field station work that established the eco-cultural pattern: extended immersion in one bioregion, then public programming built from what that specific place makes available.
More than a decade running and teaching on expeditions across oceans and continents, including work as a USCG-licensed captain, a shipboard scientist under sail, and a mountaineering guide in Kilimanjaro National Park. This is where the method came from: you cannot teach a habitat you have not lived in.