The Beautiful Futures Lab (BFL) Summer 2025 program is a revolutionary approach to relational intelligence through the combined power of direct experience and global connection. The BFL centers around twice-weekly Oika Campfire Calls—intimate, invitation-only virtual gatherings that transcend geographic boundaries while maintaining the depth and immediacy of real-world lived experiences with nature and in-person connection.
The virtual Oika Campfire Calls offer a dynamic conversational space where authentic ecological intelligence emerges naturally across geographical boundaries. Participants from around the world gather in these digital circles to learn about and experience the fundamental principles of Oika:
Each call unpacks these principles through three consistent elements:
The Campfire Calls also serve as powerful interdisciplinary incubators where professionals from diverse fields discover unexpected cross-pollination and collaborations. Participants include educators developing new curricula, artists creating ecological expressions, media professionals reimagining storytelling, entrepreneurs designing regenerative business models, leaders transforming organizational cultures, wellness professionals and therapists developing nature-based healing modalities, and scientists bridging specialized domains, among others. Participants are encouraged to form breakout groups around shared professional challenges, creating field-specific communities of practice (and encouragement) within their respective disciplines.
Get notified when the BeFuL launches this spring by joining the waitlist here: https://network.oika.com/
Nantucket serves as our primary physical laboratory, where local Embedded Oika Researchers work directly with Dr. Blundell through opportunistic engagement with scheduled public programming:
Complementing our local researchers, visiting EORs periodically travel to Nantucket for concentrated research periods with Dr. Blundell and local researchers. These intensified immersions also create powerful vicarious narratives within the unique ecology of the island.
All EORs—both local and visiting—contribute to the Campfire Calls through regular reportage, sharing their evolving insights and experiences with the global community of participants. This creates a dynamic feedback loop between direct experience and shared understanding, between local immersion and global integration.
The BFL offers multiple ways to engage with this transformative work:
Global Campfire Calls
In-Person Experiences
Oika Research
Through its innovative approach, the BFL serves as a beacon for those already experiencing ecological intelligence but lacking frameworks to understand or express it. The documentary and Earth Story interpretations become recognition signals helping people who have felt isolated in their sensitivity find others who share this way of perceiving.
The integration of all of these dimensions is particularly powerful, showing not just what ecological intelligence looks like in action but how it FEELS—the joy, wonder, grief, and awe that emerge when we recognize our continuity with natural systems. This legitimizes emotional responses often dismissed as subjective or unscientific, revealing them as authentic expressions of ecological relationship.This isn't just a program—it's a remembering of our fundamental nature as expressions of Earth's creative intelligence and an invitation to join a growing global community experiencing what becomes possible when we recognize our continuity with the living world.
Oika Research and The Beautiful Futures Lab is founded by Dr. Rich Blundell based on his life spanning ecological fieldwork, cosmological research, and the communication of complex neurophenomenological insights. As a “systems whisperer,” Dr. Blundell has developed the capacity to read emerging patterns across scales and substrates and respond with insights that integrate nature’s wisdom. His life's work is to enlist Oika in the generation of novel value-meaning matrices, and to translate ecological intelligence into strategic narratives for expanding project reach, institutional resilience and systemic health.
As economic incentives collide with ecological imperatives, Dr. Blundell believes that leaders and organizations that engage the principles of Oika will cultivate the systemic awareness to navigate change, transform challenge into innovation, and create a beautiful future.
Maria Mitchell Association, Great Harbor Yacht Club Foundation, Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest, Rutgers University, Smith College and MacLeish Field Station, The Organization of Biological Field Stations, American Anthropological Association, Syracuse University, The Museum of the White Mountains at Plymouth State, EcoMuseum Zagori, El Hondo Wetland
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