THE EARTHOS RESEARCH INITIATIVE

The Earthos Research Initiative is a research program for professionals who want to fundamentally rethink their relationship to the natural world and bring that understanding into their work. Over the course of a year, you’ll move through a curriculum designed to help you see yourself as part of Earth’s living systems, not separate from them.

MANY STREAMS, ONE OCEAN

The Earthos program works with professionals across seven different fields. Each stream applies the same core curriculum to different kinds of work.

1. CORE HUMAN DEVELOPMENT

For life coaches, therapists, spiritual practitioners, and others working with individual transformation

How does understanding human development through ecological patterns change therapeutic practice? What happens when you ground healing work in nature’s intelligence systems?

2. CULTURAL COMMUNICATION & CREATIVE EXPRESSION

For artists, writers, musicians, journalists, and cultural communicators

If artists and cultural workers can’t find a way forward, how will the broader culture find one? How does creative work change when you understand it as participating in the same creative forces that shape ecosystems and natural forms?

3. SYSTEMS THINKING & SOCIAL CHANGE

For philosophers, scientists, technologists, consultants, activists, and policy makers

What would it mean to design organizations, policies, or social movements based on how natural systems actually work? How do you create human systems that mirror nature’s patterns of resilience and adaptation? In this moment when AI is becoming ascendant, recovering our innate human intelligence—born of our relationality with the Earth—becomes essential for navigating technological transformation wisely.

4. WELLNESS & HEALING TRADITIONS

For somatic therapists, integrative health professionals, and ecological healers

How does healing practice shift when you understand the human body as inseparable from Earth’s living systems? What changes when wellness becomes about participating in natural rhythms rather than controlling biological processes?

5. REGENERATIVE BUSINESS

For entrepreneurs, business leaders, and those reimagining commerce

Can businesses function like healthy ecosystems—regenerative rather than extractive, mutually beneficial rather than competitive? What would commerce look like if it participated in Earth’s intelligence rather than treating nature as a resource?

6. EDUCATIONAL & LEARNING LEADERSHIP

For educators, facilitators, learning designers, and curriculum developers

How do you teach in ways that help people understand themselves as part of natural systems? What educational approaches emerge when you treat nature as the primary teacher of adaptation, creativity, and complex problem-solving? Education becomes a practice of inspiring wonder and awakening people to their deep belonging within the web of life.

7. NEW INDIGENEITY & CULTURAL LEADERSHIP

For people working with traditional ecological knowledge and its contemporary applications

How do indigenous knowledge systems—developed through millennia of reciprocal relationship with specific places—inform contemporary challenges? What does it mean to develop ecological relationships now that honor traditional wisdom?

SELECTION CRITERIA

We’re looking for people with intellectual curiosity and humility—those willing to have their fundamental assumptions challenged. You should be ready to change practices that no longer serve, care about impact beyond your own development, and understand the urgency of our current moment.

This starts with honoring what you already know. You’ve spent years developing expertise in your field—that matters. We’re not asking you to abandon your professional knowledge. Instead, we’re exploring how your existing work might change when you understand yourself as embedded in ecological systems that have been evolving for 4.6 billion years.

WHY THIS MATTERS NOW

Climate change, social fragmentation, economic instability, and widespread loss of meaning aren’t separate problems—they’re interconnected symptoms of a deeper issue. We’ve been operating as if humans are separate from natural systems, when in fact we’re participants within them.

Technical solutions alone won’t be enough. We need people who can work differently because they understand themselves differently—as part of Earth’s living intelligence rather than separate from it.

THE FOUR-PART CURRICULUM

PERSON: Personal Ontological Makeover

Rethinking who you are in relation to Earth

This first module asks you to reconsider your fundamental identity. Rather than seeing yourself as a separate individual who happens to live on a planet, you’ll explore what it means to be continuous with Earth’s systems—part of the same evolutionary process that’s been unfolding for 4.6 billion years of life on Earth. This requires curiosity and a willingness to question assumptions you may not realize you’re making.

PLACE: Grounded Natural Intelligence

Learning from your immediate environment

You’ll spend time studying the natural history of your local area, including its geological foundations. This isn’t just intellectual study—it’s about developing a different relationship with the landscape around you. Through repeated encounters with geological time scales and ecological processes, you begin to perceive your environment differently. This scalarity work is essential—you start to see how places shape organisms, and how organisms then shape places in return.

PRACTICE: Relational Integration bringing the first two modules into daily life

Here, understanding becomes practice. You’ll develop exercises specific to your professional stream that help you experience the reciprocal relationship between your consciousness and your environment. This reveals something important: places and mindsets aren’t separate—they continually create each other through lived experience.

PROSPER: Transformative Implementation making this work sustainable

The final module addresses practical questions: How does this change your professional practice? How do you make a living while working in this new way? You’ll connect with others in the Earthos community across different streams, building the relationships and structures needed for this approach to be viable over time.

HOW THE PROGRAM WORKS: 

Conceptual and experiential development through, virtual and IRL mentorship, place-based residency, pilgrimage and cultural communication.

RESIDENCY (30-90 days) Extended time in one place

You’ll spend at least a month in sustained relationship with a specific place—either where you currently live or somewhere you choose. This extended timeframe matters because the work requires repeated return to the same landscape. You keep encountering geological time, ecological processes, and spatial relationships until your perception begins to shift. This isn’t a weekend workshop; it’s a sustained practice that gradually changes how you see.

What you produce during residency depends on your stream:

• Artists might create site-specific work responding to the place

• Therapists might develop healing protocols based on natural patterns

• Business people might design enterprise models rooted in bioregional realities

• Educators might create curriculum grounded in local ecology

• And so on, specific to your field

PILGRIMAGE (7-21 days) Field work in wild places

At some point during the year, you’ll join Rich for direct field work. This happens during the Beautiful Futures road trip and involves going to wild places together—deserts, forests, mountains, coastlines. The work here is different from residency: direct transmission through landscape immersion, intensive consultation on how your professional practice might change, collaboration with researchers from other streams, and integration practices that connect your personal transformation with larger planetary patterns.

Possible locations include Joshua Tree, the Olympic Peninsula, Big Sur, the Colorado Rockies, and Great Lakes wetlands, among others.

EARTH STORIES

An essential part of this research is sharing what happens between you and the natural world. We call these Earth Stories—they can be anything that emerges from your engagement with place. The key is that they must be shared, both within the research community and publicly in whatever form makes sense for your work. This sharing is how ecological understanding moves beyond individual experience into broader cultural conversation.

RESEARCHER SUPPORT

You’ll have regular consultations with Rich following natural cycles—calls at new and full moons, plus video sessions at solstices and equinoxes. These provide guidance through the curriculum, help with research design questions, support for integration challenges, and connection with others in your stream and across streams.

Financial Support: Up to $5,000 per person (covers mentorship, materials, and logistics)

Time: One year, with pacing that you design within the framework

Commitment: This isn’t a casual program. It asks for intellectual honesty, willingness to question fundamental assumptions, readiness to change practices that aren’t working, and focus on broader cultural impact rather than just personal development.

WHAT CHANGES

This program changes how you understand your professional role. You’ll develop new approaches to your work, build relationships with others doing similar rethinking, and contribute to a broader shift in how we understand human participation in natural systems.

People who complete the program can become certified Earthos practitioners, which includes access to advanced training, leadership opportunities, and authorization to work with these principles in your field.

NEXT STEPS

If this resonates with you, reach out through the “Inquire” button. We can discuss whether this program makes sense for your work and answer specific questions about timing, structure, or how it might apply to your field.