Oika Research

The systemic upheavals of our time signal a changing paradigm that requires genuine leadership capable of drawing from these deepest sources of human-aligned intelligence. 

Oika is a small, epistemological insurgency initiative drawing on nature's wisdom, scientific rigor, and human intuition to help authentic leaders, their projects, and organizations, realize new actionable meaning codes as the essential capacities for rightful flourishing.

Oika Research 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.  Enlisting Oika will generate novel value-meaning matrices, and translate ecological intelligence into strategic narratives for expanding project reach, institutional resilience and systemic health.

As economic incentives collide with ecological imperatives, 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.

Recoupling Nature to Culture

Oika Research investigates a subject - be it a place, organization or other system - using Oika concepts of relationality, entanglement, and continuity. It applies perspectives and methodologies from all fields including (but not limited to) the natural sciences, creative practices, wisdom traditions, cosmic history, tech, cognitive science, and wellness. But above all, Oika Research begins on the ground, in touch with the ecological intelligence of the natural world. It then positions culture as systemically integral to this ecology across all scales. With this continuity intact, Oika Research addresses the amelioration of current, planetary symptoms present in environmental, social, and cultural ecosystems. 

Oika Researchers are forward-facing pioneers and inadvertent leaders who not only care about the state of the world but trust the intelligence of the world. Through patient, participatory immersion into both the natural world and their research subjects, they generate insights on how to apply ecological intelligence toward the betterment of the systems they are studying. It is a process that repairs discontinuities between nature and culture, re-membering a channel of creative life-force flow and revealing new pathways toward the world we want to live into.