How do humans understand “Nature”? Where do they get their ideas about surviving and thriving in the larger world, and what radical shifts in thinking might be necessary and/or in the making? This course looks at innovative projects by creative thinkers – artists, scientists and activists – who propose novel approaches to environmental issues in practical and often paradigm-shifting terms. Students are asked to develop their own creative project addressing concerns of sustainability and the environment. The class also investigates the still-developing set of attitudes about nature stemming from early American writers on nature such as Emerson, Thoreau and Muir -- along with later ones such as Rachel Carson and Anna Tsing -- while also engaging with later “eco-poetical” thinking from contemporary critical voices concerned with how people “treat” all kinds of nature, including their by-products and waste that have become second nature -- from housing developments and radioactive nuclear fallout to human shit. These writings question humans’ relationships to other species, the environment and multiple different “natures” -- in the real world and in the imagination. Among others’ creative projects to be explored will be work by Futurefarmers, Patricia Johanson, and Bonnie Ora Sherk, as well as a conceptual park commemorating smog, a speculative museum tracking the sources and consequences of waste, and an unusual zero-carbon building material made from living forms that are neither plant nor animal, along with considerations of everything from urban beekeeping and rooftop gardens to grappling with species extinction, climate change and the Great Pacific Plastic Gyre.

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