About
Where do we take root?
In 1973, a Norwegian philosopher named Arne Næss climbed down from his mountain cabin and said something most people ignored: we don’t need to save nature. We need to remember that we’re part of it.
Fifty years later, we’re still catching up to what he meant.
Arne Næss
For as long as most of us can remember, the story has been the same: take what you can, compete for what’s left, and hope someone else figures out the consequences. The result is everywhere — fractured communities, exhausted land, and a quiet feeling that we’ve lost our connection to each other and to the living world around us.
The Oslo Project exists because a different path is possible. Not a new one — an ancient one. Indigenous communities have practiced it for thousands of years. Arne Næss put it into words that the modern world could hear. And now, all over the planet, people are proving it works.
What grounds us
We’re housed by the Arne Næss Foundation in Norway. The project honours Næss’s Deep Ecology work, but it draws on something much older and wider: ancestral knowledge systems, Indigenous cosmologies, and countless ways of being that understood long before any philosopher wrote it down — life thrives through reciprocity, care, and relationship.
We stand on those continuities. We don’t claim invention.
How we work
We coordinate at scale
We weave knowledge systems together
We build infrastructure for life
