Purpose & Mission

Euglena Academy is an independent, college-level school offering academically-rigorous workshops, courses, events & resources about several radical new principles of systems sciences to students with any educational background - from the general public to professionals seeking to integrate systems sciences into their work. We are based in Eugene, Oregon, but are expanding into Portland.

Our goals are two-fold. In the short term, we provide access to knowledge about systems sciences, integrated in a fashion not available any where else in our region. Our long-term goal is to facilitate the emergence of human cultures able to survive and adapt to the significant challenges of the 21st century - notably climate change and peak oil - grounded in a systems sciences knowledge of how nature works.

Short term goals : a tri-fold focus

Gaia theory

Our program is unique. Our main focus is one of the most powerful scientific ideas since Darwin's natural selection that promises to be one of the most important ideas culturally of the 21st century: Gaia theory or geophysiology, the science of Earth's planetary-scale metabolism & homeostasis that automatically regulates the temperature and chemical composition of our atmosphere and oceans.

Systems sciences

The second major component of our curriculum is a set of scientific principles that emerged in the latter decades of the 20th century, grounded in the work of Earth's most prestigious scientists - including Nobel laureates - and published in the major scientific journals of our time. These principles add a holistic "systems" view to science that was missing from the mechanistic, reductionist science of the last three centuries, leading to many serious and even dangerous misunderstandings about nature and our relationship to it. Importantly, Gaia theory cannot be understood outside the context of systems sciences.

Biology

Both systems sciences and Gaia theory motivate a radically new and different understanding of the nature of life itself than the one promoted by 20th century mainstream sciences. Therefore, the third component in our program is this new view of life and evolution, including new models of evolution that add important and inspiring elements to natural selection, such as the role of symbiosis.

Climate change

The final component of our program - that we consider to be a subset of Gaia theory - focuses on what climatologists call "type II" climate change. It is depicted by rapid, abrupt and extreme changes that modern humans have not experienced during the last 10,000 years, yet known to be the norm on Earth. Unlike the more gradual, predictable "type I" changes predicted by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), type II change can only be fully understood from the perspective of systems sciences and Gaia theory.

Long-term goals : building foundations for human cultures

What we teach is not merely of intellectual and academic interest. We assert that systems sciences - especially Gaia theory, and the radical new view of life that they promote - provide a vital and necessary foundation of knowledge for the emergence of cultures that can survive and adapt to the impending global crises. An appropriate metaphor to describe the future is that such conditions will be equivalent to living on a different planet.

The challenges that come with these crises have only just begun and will continue to accelerate rapidly to a state that humans can scarcely imagine now. Because our species has never experienced such conditions before, we believe that courage, knowledge, adaptability and community will be our most valuable tools.

Our long-term goal is to facilitate the emergence of cultures that deeply understand life at all levels from a systems perspective, whose primary concern is the health of Gaia, necessary for not only ecological sustainability, but survivability and adaptability to planetary changes.