The University of Earth is a collective initiative based on a profound shift in understanding of the process of lifelong education and the environments that sustain it. It is a symbiotic combination of the following emphases:

A university about the Earth and the Land
(academic study, resource management -- as with a rural university)

A university for People of the Land
(reflecting concerns of indigenous people, wilderness people, deep ecologists -- as with an ecostery)

A university of planet Earth as a whole
(reflecting the diversity of the globe, symbolizing the Earth as a whole)

A university made of earth
(constructed with earth, using local skills, and blending with the local environment as a grounding of understanding)

The Earth as a university of life and learning
(the Earth as curriculum, living as learning, embodying knowledge of the Earth, as partially exemplified by biomimicry)

An emerging image of a potential university
(an emerging archetype; an implicit, potential framework; embodying the future; enriching the present with the future)

A framework for the diversity of present dreams
(enabling a holistic conceptual framework; interrelating conflicting dreams; recognizing mutually irrelevant concerns; discovering richer frameworks; embodying polarities and paradoxes)

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A Meaningfully Imaginative Pattern

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This initiative is consistent with the need to explore subtler and more dynamic approaches to organization, beyond the unfocused "vision" of "networking" or "knowledge management". The issues are articulated in Consciously Self-reflexive Global Initiatives: Renaissance zones, complex adaptive systems, and third order organizations. The initiative is complementary to three others -- each accessible via the logo above -- mutually counter-balancing echoes of a central process in the moment and beyond time. Together these form an emerging, overarching union of interweaving processes: a potential "pattern that connects". The challenge to comprehension is discussed elsewhere (Dynamic Reframing of "Union": implications for the coherence of knowledge, social organization and personal identity).

These issues are further clarified in a table interrelating the four initiatives (In Quest of "Meta-Union"?). The nature of any union of significance is therefore not predefined by any form of understanding but is progressively and continually (re)discovered in time. Indeed, since "yoga" signifies "union" (in Sanskrit), the corollary may be that the challenge of any "union" of significance implies some form of "yoga".

Frequently asked questions about this initiative are addressed in a FAQ. The web address of this site (www.un-terra.org) also offers a caution against overly hasty assumptions -- as discussed separately.