Preserving and stewarding the eight cultures of Earth.
Octa Cultures exists to preserve and steward the eight cultures of Earth across 846 recognised ecoregions, and to cultivate a worldwide network through which people can share knowledge, wisdom and resources in service to the long-term flourishing of life on Earth.
At its heart is a commitment to human freedom, and to the conditions in which all life can continue and flourish.
A worldwide network, rooted in place.
We envision a network of communities across Earth’s ecoregions, stewarding the living relationships within them. They are connected by a common framework and shared goals, and rooted in the ecological conditions and relationships of each place. Together they support cooperation, learning and coordinated action for the preservation of nature.
Rooted in place
Every community grows from the ecology and relationships of its own place.
Connected across the Earth
A shared framework links local work to a worldwide purpose.
Built across generations
This is a multigenerational undertaking. The knowledge, relationships and institutions it needs will be built over decades.
Healing the relationships that sustain life.
Relationships under strain
Life is sustained through relationships, within humanity and among all of Earth’s biological cultures. Yet these relationships have been damaged by our collective patterns of production, consumption, land use and resource extraction, and by the pollution they generate. Highways cut through wildlife corridors. Industrial agriculture exhausts the soil. Plastic chokes the oceans. Urban sprawl replaces forests.
A geological force
Since the mid-20th century, human activity has grown exponentially and become a geological force. It has destabilised the self-regulating mechanisms of the Earth system, including the integrity of the biosphere and the organisms that compose it.
The root
At the root of the ecological crisis lies our disconnection and perceived separation from nature. It shows in how we produce and consume, and more deeply in our thinking, values, beliefs and worldviews. Because it runs through every aspect of life, the crisis is not only ecological. It is a polycrisis, with economic, political, social, technological, mental and spiritual dimensions.
Our response
Octa Cultures exists to study, preserve, heal and restore these relationships across scales, from individuals to ecoregions and the Earth as a whole. We develop systems, initiate and support preservation projects, plan for restoration where it’s needed, educate and connect people, and steward an evolving body of knowledge in support of ecosystem conservation and regeneration worldwide.
An uncertain threshold
Our species, and every species on Earth, faces an uncertain threshold. It took decades and centuries to destabilise the Earth system, and it will take decades and centuries to bring it into a new balance. The next several years will be critical in deciding whether that future remains possible for the generations who follow us.
Organised around living systems, not borders.
To heal our relationship with nature, we need to organise ourselves around the carrying capacity and ecological conditions of the places we inhabit: their climate, watersheds, landforms, soils, ecosystems and communities of life.
Ecoregions are areas where ecosystems share broadly similar environmental conditions and communities of life. Bioregions group ecoregions by larger patterns of climate, landform and biology. Together they show how living systems connect across political borders.
The eight cultures do not exist apart. They form living systems through their relationships with one another and with particular places, and those relationships take a distinct form in every ecoregion. Understanding them takes all eight aspects, because the life of a place can’t be separated from its economic, political, social, technological, mental and spiritual conditions.
Organising our work across 846 ecoregions lets us hold local and global together. Stewardship is rooted in local conditions, while knowledge, relationships and action are coordinated around the Earth. How the work takes shape in each ecoregion is still being developed.
Three pathways from knowledge to action.
Our work moves along three pathways. Each is a direction for development, and each will take shape as our relationships, resources and capacity grow.
Education
Interactive learning built on the Octa Methodology, starting with Octa Curriculum.
Preservation
Protecting places that are still ecologically functional, before they become degraded.
Stakeholder Responsibilities
Holding Nature’s seat in the governance of every Octa enterprise.
The first seed.
Octa Cultures began as independent research into the relationships between Earth’s cultures, its ecosystems and the human systems that shape them. That research bore its first fruit: the Octa Methodology.
Octa HQ was created to support Octa Cultures and to develop the other core capabilities its mission needs, known as Seeds. Octa Cultures holds the Methodology, and Octa HQ creates the environment and capacities to apply it across projects and enterprises.
Today Octa Cultures is being developed within Octa HQ. Its next milestone is incorporation as an independent organisation that can hold the Nature and Methodology seat, receive funds and steward projects.
Roadmap
- Foundation (now): Grow the knowledge base, datasets and maps; open the curriculum to its first teachers and students; build a network of relationships.
- Establishment: Incorporate Octa Cultures as an independent organisation and formalise its seat as Nature’s stakeholder.
- Initial action: Develop select intelligence capabilities into models, fund preservation opportunities and develop and support early projects.
- Ecoregional network: Connect place-based communities and projects into a coordinated worldwide network.
Help grow the network.
Octa Cultures is at the start of a long road, and relationships will carry it. We’d like to hear from:
- Communities and landholders caring for places that are still ecologically intact
- Conservation and preservation organisations working in any ecoregion
- Teachers interested in the curriculum
- Researchers working across ecology, culture and living systems
- Anyone who wants to support the work as it grows