About

Why The Field now

We are living through a profound rupture in our relationships – within ourselves, with one another and with the living Earth. Anxiety and depression are rising, war and injustice divide communities, lands and waters are being degraded, and species are disappearing. Many of the systems we have created continue to depend on extraction and separation.

Yet life is relational. We exist through relationships we do not always see, sense or remember – with one another and with place, through water, soil and air, with other forms of life, across generations and deep time, and through different understandings of meaning and the sacred.
The Field creates space to remember and experience these relationships, not only understand them. Through attention, encounter, practice and different ways of knowing, we seek to make what is often invisible perceptible – and explore how this might transform the ways we live, work, decide and care together.

This work is already happening in many forms and places. Around the world, people and communities are restoring relationships with the living Earth and exploring different ways of living and working together.

The Field seeks to bring into view what is already emerging – often quietly and at the margins – so we can find one another, connect, learn and re-member our belonging within the living Earth.

How it is emerging

The Field has grown and continues to evolve through listening, encounters and conversations across places and ways of knowing – with indigenous and local communities, and people across science, arts and culture, spirituality, civic life and business, as well as local and international institutions exploring how interdependence and reciprocity might reshape the ways we live, work and make decisions together.

Geneva is the first place of sustained inquiry and practice. What emerges here can travel through relationships, partnerships and digital space, informing how The Field may take root elsewhere.

Acknowledgement of Place

The Field begins in Geneva, within the Léman basin and Rhône watershed – a landscape shaped by ice and water over deep time.

The Rhône Glacier once covered this region. Human presence reaches back to the end of the Ice Age, followed by Neolithic and Bronze Age communities along the lake, the Celtic Allobroges and the Roman world. Much about the earliest people who lived here – their names, stories and relationships with this place – remains unknown.

Across these many layers, life continues through relationships – between people, water, land and other forms of life. Many have become obscured or forgotten.

We acknowledge those who came before us, those who care for this place today, and the waters, lands and many forms of life with whom we share it.

A Place of Encounter

Across centuries, Geneva has become a place of encounter across borders, cultures, faiths and ways of knowing – shaped by religious transformation and migration, humanitarian action and international cooperation, Indigenous advocacy, and exchanges across science, culture and spirituality.

These encounters have not always been harmonious. Geneva’s history also carries exclusion, unequal power and contested relationships. Genuine encounter asks us to acknowledge these tensions, not overlook them.

Numerous encounters also take shape from the ground up, through local communities, cultural and ecological initiatives, and spaces experimenting with different ways of living and participating together.

What we do

The Field is an evolving inquiry and practice, shaped through encounters, experimentation and learning across places.

Five interconnected practices shape this work: Cultivating Presence, Remembering the Past, Imagining Futures, Sharing Power and Storytelling Otherwise. Beginning in Geneva, these practices come alive through four interconnected forms:

Field Circles: Small, place-based gatherings for shared inquiry, attention and practice.
Field Conversations: Public encounters across different ways of knowing, shared beyond place through partners and digital media.
Field Mapping: Making visible relationships among people, places, practices, stories and ecologies, beginning with Geneva and New York.
Fieldnotes: Stories, observations and learning from the inquiry across places.

Stewardship & Partners

Founding Steward: Barbara Bulc
Founding Circle: Wilhelmina Welsch · Richard Le Quellec · Hannah Entwisle Chapuisat · Ome · Sari Galapo · Laurens Houwink · Barbara Bulc
Field Fellows: Laurens Houwink · Shannon Smith
Creative Partners: Vevig | Design
September Digital | Development
Newglyph | Typeface Romain du Roi
With gratitude to: Janot Mendler de Suarez · Kim Polman · Friedrich Hinterberger · Cyprien Basso · Ross Hall · Christophe Chalamet · Michael Meier · Olivier Kaeser · Beatrice Milbert · Caromai Bouquet · Madhusudan Agrawal · Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee · Sissel Tolaas · Jude Currivan · Annette Kaiser · Amy Page · Violeta Bulc · Father Krizolog Cimerman · Eric Gordon · Nilanjana Dasgupta – and others whose conversations, questions and contributions have helped shape The Field and its emergence.

Home cover photograph: Kim Polman, Hope Farm, UK
The Field photography: Barbara Bulc

field · champ · polje · Feld · campus · kṣetra · ba (場)

Open land. A place of cultivation. An area of inquiry. A pattern of forces and relationships, visible and invisible.

Across science, culture and spiritual traditions, the field takes on different meanings, evoking space, interdependence, emergence and transformation.

We are part of the field. We shape the field, and it shapes us.