The practice of ecological storytelling by writers, architects, designers, and artists produces texts, objects, and speculative representations often towards a polemic and often in isolation by discipline. Students in this seminar will engage in learning through writing and made work - focusing on three key words, retreat, remain, restore.The history of ecological storytelling, from paleolithic cave dwellers’ depictions suggesting a unity with nature, to utopian promises and dystopian warnings, illustrates an evolving sense of human relational identity to nature. As our everyday lives are increasingly suffused by the impacts of climate change and climate chaos, we must craft new narratives that critically reframe the language, syntax, diction, form, media, and representation of ecologies. Within this shifting philosophical and ontological context, the CCA Ecopoesis Project is an interdisciplinary curricular initiative investigating ecological storytelling at the intersection of the arts, humanities and design. This project generates humanistic knowledge, new narratives, and interdisciplinary forms of practice and pedagogy around questions of ecologies that challenge disciplinary norms. This seminar is designed to ground students across disciplines in the historic and contemporary facts of climate science as a denominator on making work -- writing, as well as 2D, 3D, and hybrid projects. During the first five weeks, students will experiment with varied forms of writing about climate, using words and in many cases images, to create a text. With provisional historical expertise established, students will create self-directed projects -- using their specific knowledge of making and within their own disciplines -- to explore responses to climate chaos.Readings/work to be studied include: Cli-Fi; histories; climate science; artist’s responses to climate; BACKGROUND: The Ecopoesis Project is directed by Professors Leslie Carol Roberts, Adam Marcus, and Christopher Falliers, and is a collaboration between the MFA Writing Program and the CCA Architectural Ecologies Lab, offering a platform for interdisciplinary discussion of ecologies as form and language.

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