Course Offerings

After hosting a successful series of courses on Biodiversity and Symbiosis with staff scientist and restoration ecologist Jim Laurie, we at Biodiversity for a Livable Climate have recognized the need for a larger curriculum on ecosystem restoration, nature-based solutions to climate change, and the transformations required for our civilization to navigate the challenges ahead of us.

Explore our course offerings below, and stay tuned for more courses to be announced!


Spring 2024

Biodiversity 10 Deep Dive: Beavers, Wetlands & Shorelines with Jim Laurie

This 12-week course meets every Wednesday, starting February 21 and running through May 8, 2024. Sessions will be held from 12 – 2pm ET and 7 – 9pm ET on Zoom to accommodate students’ schedules.

Join us for a deep dive into wetlands, shorelines, the water cycle, and the solutions powered by a systems approach to climate.

Are you ready to transform your understanding of how life on the planet works and how we can play a role? Join us as we follow the transformation of two leading writers and thinkers to a deeper understanding of natural systems, our role, and the ability of nature to cool the planet. Register now to claim your seat.


Fall 2023

A New Climate Story with Christopher Haines

This 6-week course meets every Monday, starting November 13 and running through December 18, 2023. Sessions will be held from 1 – 2pm ET and 7 – 8pm ET on Zoom to accommodate students’ schedules.

This course investigates the consequences of regenerative land management with sessions on soils, forests, and water.

Imagine a world where innovative thinking and peer-reviewed science offers hope and empowerment, with a path to reverse climate change in months, years or decades, not centuries. Imagine principles you could apply to improve your own circumstances, even if the rest of the world fails to act. As triple-digit temperatures warp summers, there is no better time to consider a new perspective. 

Biodiversity 9: Transformation to a Holistic Perspective – Nature Can Cool the Planet with Jim Laurie

This 12-week course meets every Wednesday, starting September 20 and running through December 13, 2023. Sessions will be held from 12 – 2pm ET and 7 – 9pm ET on Zoom to accommodate students’ schedules.

Join us for a deep dive into the science, history, and cultural connections of holistic thinking and a systems approach to climate.


Spring 2023

Sustainability and Humankind’s Dilemma: Life on a Tough New Planet with Nancy Lee Wood

This is a 6 week course that meets every Friday, starting April 21 and running through May 26, 2023. Sessions will be held from 12 – 2pm ET on Zoom.

Approached from a Social Science perspective, this 6-week course provides a broad overview of the multiple crises confronting humankind: climate change, peak oil, resource depletions, ecological deterioration, and societal collapse.  It focuses on the current dilemmas in which humankind finds itself; how we have arrived at this moment; the resulting psycho-social-economic impacts; and several socio-economic-ecological regenerative strategies for mitigation. 

Ecological Economics 2: Finding Our Way to a New Understanding with Fred Jennings

This 8 week course meets every Monday, starting April 3 and running through May 22, 2023. Sessions will be held from 12 – 2pm ET on Zoom.

Join us for an 8-week excursion into our economic culture and why it is doing us so much harm. You will emerge from this course with a far more robust understanding of how to think about social systems and to design them to work better for all of us. The course will open you up to a far less dismal economics than you might expect!

Biodiversity 8 Deepdive: Symbiosis is Challenging Survival of the Fittest with Jim Laurie

This 12 week course meets every Wednesday, starting March 1 and running through May 12, 2023. Sessions will be held from 12 – 2pm ET and 7 – 9pm ET on Zoom to accommodate students’ schedules.

Join us for a deep dive into the science, history, and cultural implications of how we understand evolution and interspecies relationships.

Biodiversity 8 Deepdive will explore recent discoveries in biology and the ancient wisdom of Indigenous observers in an effort to identify these better metaphors and weave together a more hopeful vision of the future than “survival of the fittest.”  For example, the microbiome in our human gut was not appreciated until early in this century.  Now we are finding that trees and mycorrhizal fungi work together in healthy soils to create a subsurface microbiome.  Must multicellular organisms like plants, animals, and fungi nurture healthy microbiomes to ensure their own survival?  Let’s find out. 


Fall 2022

Biodiversity 7: Rewilding Half the Earth to Create A Future We Want with Jim Laurie

Beginning Wednesday, October 12, 2022, the course meets for two hours at 12pm and 7pm ET every Wednesday, to accommodate multiple time zones. Read more and register here!

In Biodiversity 7: ReWilding Half the Earth to Create a Future We Want, Jim Laurie will lead students in examining restorative possibilities such as protecting half the earth, creating mini-forests using the Miyawaki method, and increasing wetlands. 


Summer 2022

Biodiversity 6: Systems Thinking & Scenarios – Tools for Creating Better Ecological Futures with Jim Laurie

Beginning Wednesday, June 22, 2022, the course meets for two hours at 12pm and 7pm ET every Wednesday, to accommodate multiple time zones. Read more and register here!

In Biodiversity 6: Systems Thinking & Scenarios – Tools for Creating Better Ecological Futures, Jim Laurie will lead students in taking on the question, “could humans be a global force for the reemergence of healthy ecosystems on a much faster timeline?” To answer this question, the course will look at systems thinking and scenario-writing as tools for examining the “Whole” and finding out what possibilities exist for the future.


Spring 2022

Heat Planet: Restore Ecosystems – Restore Climate with Christopher Haines

Beginning Wednesday, May 4, 2022, the course meets for two hours at 9am and 7pm ET every Wednesday, to accommodate multiple time zones. It will run for six weeks until June 8.

In Heat Planet, Christopher Haines will lead students on an exploration of the sources of heat and climate disruption, and the ways that local action can significantly improve local climates. He will shift away from the dominant paradigm focusing on the re-radiation of heat by greenhouse gases to the ways that our cultivation (or degradation) of the living surface of the planet can manage (or create) heat. The course will empower us to take on the cooling and re-greening actions necessary to rebalance local and regional, and eventually global climate.

Social Solutions: Making Systems More Resilient with Fred Jennings

Beginning Monday, April 4, 2022, the course meets from 12 – 1 pm ET every Monday and Thursday. It will run until June 30, with a break on Memorial Day (Monday, May 30).

In Social Solutions, Dr. Fred Jennings will focus on developing a working group of people who are ready to engage in ecological economics and to address social problems creatively and intelligently. Students will develop their practical analytical skills by examining our failing democratic processes and our fisheries management systems.

Horizonal Thinking: Toward a New Economics with Fred Jennings

Beginning Monday, April 4, 2022, the course meets from 1 – 2 pm ET every Monday and Thursday. It will run until June 30, with a break on Memorial Day (Monday, May 30).

In Horizonal Thinking, Dr. Fred Jennings will guide students in an exploration of planning horizons, explaining his approach to an ecological economics based on favoring collaboration over competition. Students will examine why and how our society has evolved toward the destruction of our ecological life-support systems, and how we might change our economic culture to protect ourselves against this destruction.

Ego VS Eco: How Human, Animal, and Planet Health Interconnect with Tania Roa

Beginning Wednesday, March 2, 2022, the course meets for an hour and a half each week for 8 weeks (with one week’s break in the middle).

Tania Roa, MSc in Animals and Public Policy and advocate for wildlife and intersectional environmentalism, will lead students on an exploration of the connections between human, animal, and planet health.


Fall 2021

An Introduction to Ecological Economics with Fred Jennings

Fred Jennings, our Ecological Economist, led students into an exploration of the ecological foundations for economics and the economic mechanisms that can support healthy ecological function.

Biodiversity 5: Cooling the Climate by Mastering the Carbon Cycle with Jim Laurie

In this fifth course in the Biodiversity and Symbiosis series, Jim Laurie and the team of budding planetary restorers took on the challenge of maximizing photosynthesis in forests, grasslands, and oceans. We explored how this powerful process can rebalance the carbon cycle and work to cool the climate.