Earth Words explores how language, design, and art shape the way we understand and inhabit Earth's diverse ecologies Bridging environmental humanities and creative practice, the course invites students to engage with inclusive, place-based, and decolonial approaches to ecology. Through readings, design interventions, and writing/visual projects, students consider how narrative—visual, spatial, and textual—can reveal the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman systems. We study artists, designers, and writers who expand ecological awareness across cultures and communities, from speculative design to indigenous storytelling and environmental justice art. Students will create a series of short experimental works culminating in a public-facing project that reimagines how we communicate care for the planet. Readings to include: Robin Wall Kimmerer, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants; Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction;” Kate Orff / SCAPE, Toward an Urban Ecology; Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World; Jenny Odell, How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy; The Center for Genomic Gastronomy, Edible Futures Formafantasma, Cambio, among others.

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