Restricted to first semester first year students in the College of Arts and Humanities.

How can human societies shift from parasitic to mutualistic environmental behaviors? This interdisciplinary course examines paths to solve our great challenges: climate change and habitat degradation caused by fossil fuels and rampant consumer culture. Themes include evolutionary mutualism, group selection, permaculture, Indigenous knowledge, post-petroculture, closed loops, and zero waste. These mutualisms reveal how humanist subjects like identity, culture, narrative, and environmental injustice affect our relationship with Earth. Creative assignments and guest speakers will inform in-depth projects that redesign parasitisms to be mutualisms in green infrastructure, sustainable agriculture, greenwashing, environmental psychology and sociology, and creative "righting."