About

Exploring the full spectrum of human experience - in service of Earth

ONE is an interdisciplinary team of researchers, facilitators, and learning designers. As a learning organisation, we hold research and practice in close relationship – committed to continuously interrogating our own assumptions and methods as we produce knowledge.

Our approach to education uses direct experience as a gateway for inquiry. Rather than transmitting a fixed body of content, we create connective experiences that open participants to other – including cross-cultural – ways of knowing, understanding and relating with the living world. Learning is more than cognitive: it is relational, embodied and oriented toward equitable action.

We believe that education and social transformation are best supported by four integrated practices:

Creating meaningful experiences: designing encounters with ideas, places and communities that make questions felt and real.

Inviting rigorous, open-minded research: pursuing evidence with methodological care, while remaining genuinely open to what falls outside established frameworks.

Facilitating deep reflective learning: supporting the kind of sustained, honest inquiry that changes not just what people know, but how they think and who they act (or “be”) in the world.

Cultivating connected community action: linking learning to practice and practice to the communities and landscapes most affected by ecological breakdown.

These areas are concurrent and mutually reinforcing as a pedagogy designed to move from insight to transformation.

Organisation for Noetic Ecology

MISSION:

To advance rigorous, place-based research and transformative education in noetic ecology – examining how knowledge systems, perception, and cultural narratives shape our relationship with the living world. With an Afro-ecocentric lens, we are engaging with practice-based approaches for knowledge co-production that achieve ethical, equitable and collective shifts for regenerative futures.

VISION:

A world in which diverse ways of knowing – scientific, Indigenous, and place-based experience – are seriously engaged and responsibly integrated in research, governance, and practice and wherein the renewal of deeper human-nature relationships is understood as inseparable from social-ecological equity and the symbiosis of how we think, learn and live together.

VALUES:

Our core principles that define our culture and guide our practice:

Epistemic humility:  We hold our own worldviews and frameworks lightly, remaining genuinely open to ways of knowing that differ from – and challenge – our own.

Relational accountability: We recognise that knowledge is never produced in isolation. We are accountable to the communities, places and traditions we work with and learn from.

Rigour with openness: We are committed to careful, evidence-informed inquiry and to the recognition that evidence itself is shaped by the questions we know how to ask. Both matter.

Place-based rootedness : We believe ecological understanding must be grounded in specific landscapes, histories, and communities. We resist abstraction that loses touch with the particular. We embrace nuance.

Transformative intent: Research and learning are not ends in themselves. We are oriented toward the cognitive, ethical, and collective shifts that more just and regenerative futures require.

Reciprocity: We approach relationships between humans and the living world – and between knowledge systems – as mutually reinforcing, rather than extractive. What we take, we seek to return in kind.

Ethical courage: We are willing to question dominant frameworks, highlight the costs of epistemic exclusion and sit with the difficulty of genuinely inter/transdisciplinary work.

STATUS:

Founded in early 2019, the Organisation for Noetic Ecology (NPC2019/306713/08) is a not-for-profit enterprise registered in South Africa under section 14 of the Companies Act, 2008. If you resonate with our work and can contribute financially, donations are gratefully accepted and utilised wisely:

Account Name: Org. for Noetic Ecology NPC
Bank: First National Bank (FNB)
Branch Code: 250655
Account Number: 62815892147
SWIFT: FIRNZAJJ

We are the institutional host of the Outdoor Health & Connection Alliance (OHCA) – formerly the Masiyembo Association

Past partners, clients & funders

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Why We Do It

Something has gone wrong in how we relate to the living world. Most of us can feel it.

Across cultures and contexts, there is a growing recognition that the ecological crises of our time are not only technical failures – they are symptoms of a deeper rupture: a disconnection in how modern societies perceive, understand and belong to the natural world. Call it what you will. Indigenous traditions have named versions of it for generations. Psychologists document its effects. Ecologists trace its consequences across landscapes. The disconnection is real and its costs – ecological, social, psychological – are exacerbating.

Yet the wisdom in nature itself offers us something important: the possibility of “discontinuous change”.

Consider water in a glass. At some point, when conditions shift, that still and seemingly inert liquid can freeze, expand, and shatter the vessel that contained it. Transformation is not always gradual. Tipping points exist. New configurations become possible…not only through incremental adjustment, but through a fundamental change in state.

We believe this kind of change is possible in human consciousness, culture, and relationship with the living world. Creating the conditions for it is our work.

This is why ONE focuses on education and learning – beyond “content transmission” – and extending to the cultivation of renewed ways of perceiving, thinking, and acting. We are not really interested in education that reinforces the competitive, reductionist frameworks that have contributed to the crisis. We are indeed interested in learning that does something different: that deepens relationship, opens inquiry and inspires responsible action.

Our educational philosophy rests on four integrated dimensions of human experience:

Thinking: rigorous, open-minded inquiry that questions inherited assumptions and remains genuinely curious about what lies beyond dominant frameworks.

Feeling:  direct, immersive experience of the living world as the irreplaceable foundation for understanding it. You cannot think your way into a relationship with a place. You have to be there to appreciate it, to truly dwell in it …

Doing:  committed, community-grounded action that connects learning to consequence and knowledge to responsibility. We love the idea of “communities of practice” or “circles of coherence”  – they and others point to the same idea of “rebuilding the village mind”.

Being: a grounded sense of self and purpose that makes sustained engagement possible. Something that can transcend burnout, despair and desensitisation –  perhaps best described by Joana Macy as “active hope”…the kind of hope that earnestly enacts without guaranteeing outcomes.

These dimensions are simultaneous and mutually reinforcing – a relational pedagogy designed for the complexity and urgency of the moment we find ourselves in.

At the heart of this approach is a conviction: that the severance between human beings and the rest of the living world is not our natural condition. It is a historical and cultural product that can, with care and intention, be undone, unlearned and reimagined.

Every human society that has lived sustainably within its ecological context has done so through relationships – with specific places, specific species, specific seasonal rhythms – maintained through knowledge, practice and what we might call “ecological belonging”. That capacity is not lost. It is still rooted in our collective ancestral memory. It has simply been suppressed, undervalued and systematically excluded from dominant narratives and educational models.

ONE exists to remember, recover and reactivate our innate relationship – through rigorous inquiry, lived experience and the kind of learning that makes durable transformation not just conceivable, but actually possible.

How We Do It

As a core philosophy and application of consciousness we seek to generate:

…expanded influence through shared intention;
…enhanced awareness through quality attention;
…enduring gratitude through authentic appreciation, and to collectively achieve:
…enlivened wellbeing through deep connection with one’s self, place and community (human and non-human).

As a field (of deep learning and transformative inquiry and practice), we are:

…designing a style of connective learning that nurtures the diversity of human experience and provides a ‘place to land’ for persons wishing to ground and reflect on other ‘ways of knowing’  and embodying the depth of human-nature relations.

…customising learning to participants’ needs by drawing on, applying and integrating modalities such as: Eastern Philosophy, Theory U, Goethian Practice, 8 Shields, Deep Ecology and Integral Ecology.

As a movement (in ecology and the human-nature relationship), we are:

… being part of a growing global community supporting change-makers, story-weavers, path-finders, and nature-lovers who are committed to a shared vision for positive systemic transformation.

…advancing ‘noetics’  by exercising creativity, working cooperatively, living connectively and awakening a consciousness of wholeness.

… sharing a new story for humanity and supporting others in doing the same by connecting people with people, people with places and people with (the many) faces in community.

… cultivating a culture of connectedness that reawakens the human experience of belonging in relationship with all life and with a sense of responsibility toward future generations.

Ultimately, we are bringing people together in ways that allow for remembering our shared humanity, rediscovering our bond with all that is and re-imagining a future as one…

  • Eastern Philosophy

    Taoist, Zen & Buddhist practices for intensifying & stilling ‘life force’ to enable awakened, aware & attentive being

  • Goethian Practice

    Goethian observation & phenomenology for fresh ways of seeing and embodying our lived experience in the world

  • 8 Shields

    8 Shields connection modelling for awakening naturalist awareness and belonging within a regenerative culture

  • Theory U

    Theory U as a meta-framework for profound social-ecological systems change

  • Deep Ecology

    Deep Ecology for open-minded inquiry (thinking), sensorial activity (feeling) & committed responsible action (doing)

  • Integral Ecology

    Integral Ecology for uniting multiple perspectives on the world by honouring all perspectives & dimensions of ‘reality’.

What is Noetic Ecology?

Noetic ecology is about exploring the human~nature relationship through direct experience and different ‘ways of knowing’. It encourages open dialogue, meaningful inquiry and embodied practices to support deep learning and collective action in service of a new story: one that embraces our interconnectedness with the world.

Noetic [from the Greek noētos, nous and noein] meaning ‘a perception’ or ‘intelligence’, pertaining to the mind.

Ecology [from the Greek oikos] meaning ‘house, place, habitation’; the study of the relations of living things to one another and their environment.

Nous refers to ‘matters of the mind’ and whilst often simply translated as  ‘intellect’ (as a noun) it refers more deeply to the innate human capacity for directly acquiring ‘an intelligence’ (as a verb): that is, accessing information, knowledge and understanding aside from using only logic, reasoning and ‘usual’ or habitual modes of perception.

This idea of ‘direct knowing’ or ‘direct perception’ is inherent to most ancient traditions (e.g. Hunter-Gatherer, Greek and Eastern cultures) but has been displaced by the overtly dualistic, rational and materialist empiricism of modern science as the favoured (and often exclusive) means of gaining knowledge of oneself, humankind and our relationship with the world.

Philosopher William James (1902) referred to noetic as “insight into depths of truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect”. For example, the ‘noetic quality’ of a profound experience is the sense of epiphany. In this sense, noetic includes both grounded reasoning and ‘inner knowing’ as acquired through other illuminating forms of awareness (e.g. intuition, insight and revelation) that go beyond what is usually available to our normal senses and power of intellectual reason.

Importantly, ‘noetic’ includes what we pay attention to (noema) and how we pay attention to it (noesis). In practicing how and where we focus attention, noetic approaches can repattern habitual perception and cultivate a shift in worldview.

Noetic therefore encompasses fuller understandings of consciousness and the diverse ‘ways of knowing’ that shape how we perceive ‘the other’ and participate in the world. It acknowledges that multiple – even opposing – realities may coexist.

Ecology is derived from the Greek oikos meaning ‘house, place, habitation’. It is often understood as the branch of scientific inquiry dealing with the relations of living things to one another and their physical environment. The field of ecology seeks to therefore understand how we, as the human species, live in relationship with other species in this shared home we call earth.

Noetic ecology applies insights gleaned from direct and profound experience to shape how humans can live in harmony with the earth and cosmos.

Noetic ecology is inspired by the work of the Institute of Noetic Sciences (IONS) which has for decades been at the forefront of supporting individual and collective change through consciousness research, transformative learning and applied practices that support heightened awareness and connectedness in our daily lives.

Noetic ecology is motivated by the view that humans are wired for connection, creativity and co-operation; and can orient consciousness as a quality of awareness to influence how we attune, participate and co-evolve with earth and the cosmos. We have the capacity to thrive when this circuitry is fully engaged.

Noetic ecology is a ‘practice’,  a ‘field’ and a ‘movement’.

As a dedicated practice, it is essentially the art of noticing: the how and what we pay attention to in nature. It is a fundamental appreciation that the quality of attention determines not only the quality of our experience (and the benefits derived from our nature interactions), but is capable of profoundly changing the world we perceive.

As an open field of learning, it applies transdisciplinary approaches to rigorously explore the full spectrum of human-nature experience. Utilising scholarly inquiry, it draws on cross-cultural science and wisdom traditions to further understandings of interconnectedness and how it can best guide and support regenerative living.

As an inspired philosophical movement, noetic ecology invites ‘active hope’ through ‘delicate activism’: cultivating receptivity, awareness and compassion as a basis for authentic action. It provides practices that allow us to see the world with new eyes and to take a fresh view of realities different to our own. It focuses on what inspires us and what we can tangibly do in our lives. It invites us to utilise the power of consciousness – through intention and attention – to generate deep connection with nature, people, self and our greater source of purpose. As agents of change, it requires us to embody what we wish to see – from the inside out.

In practice, noetic ecology is inclusive and pragmatic. At this moment in human history, it recognises that integration is as important as innovation. It therefore embraces diverse modalities that adhere to a worldview of interconnectedness, reawaken the unity of mind-body-spirit and ‘re-member’ our affiliation with earth.

Noetic ecology fuses our primal origins with futurist aspirations. It urges us to remember humanity’s intimate ancestral relationships with wilder nature that shaped our evolution and allowed us to become fully human. From a futuristic perspective, it invites a new story (cosmology): reimagining our becoming in a way that harnesses the collective potential of humanity to act in service of the whole.

Noetic ecology therefore both grounds and elevates the agency of consciousness and humans’ ability to exercise it as the generative power for effecting profound change. Organisations and networks inspired by noetic ecology ultimately aim to co-create transformative pathways for remembering our core humanity, rediscovering our bond with all life and re-visioning a regenerative future…