About the author

Marna Hauk, PhD, directs programs and innovates learning and scholarship in regenerative futures, arts-based methods, climate justice, and leadership and imagination. For the past decade, she has directed the programs of the Institute for Earth Regenerative Studies (earthregenerative.org), leading social incubators and learning immersions at the convergence of eco-restoration, creativity, and the living wisdom traditions. Dr. Hauk serves as Associate Director and Founding Faculty of the Doctoral Program in Visionary Practice and Regenerative Leadership at Southwestern College and New Earth Institute.

Dr. Hauk catalyzes graduate programs that are experientially immersive, creatively integrative, intellectually challenging, diversity-inclusive, research- and praxis-extensive, and skills-building for the Great Turning. She is a member of the Work That Reconnects Network and serves on the editorial boards of the Journal of Sustainability Education and Artizein: Arts and Teaching Journal.

A maverick in residential and community-based graduate program innovation, Dr. Hauk has created online, hybrid, and experiential curricula in ecopreneurship, regenerative leadership, and advanced research methods. She has developed and taught fifteen graduate courses in sustainability, leadership, regenerative design, collaborative inquiry, and ecofeminism, and she has designed and taught more than seventy semester-long graduate classes. Dr. Hauk was awarded a multi-year fellowship from the North American Association for Environmental Education and the EPA in Community Climate Change for her curriculum leveraging social incubators and regenerative creativity for project-based community climate change visionary activists. Dr. Hauk also received a recent grant and national publication for her curriculum and research in contemplative climate justice leadership from Curriculum for the Bioregion. Her research interviewing innovative wisdom school founders inspired by queer ecologies merited special selection at the Research Symposium of the NAAEE. Her scholarship on queer, land-based regenerative leadership has been featured in multiple chapters and books.

Dr. Hauk co-edited two recent books: a practitioner volume on Community Climate Change Education: A Mosaic of Approaches (NAAEE & Cornell, 2017) as well as a scholarly compendium, Vibrant Voices: Women, Myth, and the Arts (Women and Myth, 2018), which was named the top 100 notable books in the field. A published poet and scholar with 130+ refereed publications and presentations, Dr. Hauk’s recent work has appeared in the Journal of Sustainability Education, the Australian Journal of Environmental Education, the International Environmental Review, Artizein, On Sustainability, Bumerang, Cornell Press, and Ecopsychology. She has presented internationally through peer-review selection, including at the International Symposium of Poetic Inquiry, the International Congress on Qualitative Inquiry, the Women’s Studies Association, The American Educational Research Association, and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education.

Dr. Hauk graduated with honors from Prescott College with a PhD in Education, with a focus on Sustainability Education. Her doctoral research leveraged biomimicry and regenerative design while interviewing founders of earth wisdom schools to develop educational approaches for ecosocial regenerative creativity and socially just innovation. She graduated with a Masters in Culture and Spirituality from the Holy Names University Sophia Program and graduated Phi Beta Kappa from Reed College in Comparative Literature. An active consultant, Dr. Hauk’s client list includes public and private universities as well as private sector organizations, many nonprofits, and several startup organizations.

Dr. Hauk flourishes near Hood River, Oregon, on the traditional lands of the Chinookan and Wasco Nations, in the Pacific Cascadia bioregion, creating permaculture and regeneratively-designed teaching and learning gardens and food forests for Gaian flourishing.

Chapter overview

In order to explore the fertile intersection of the mythic, the monstrous, and the possible, I have developed a collaborative writing game called Ecotopia versus Zombie Apocalypse. This game is an act of herald, a creative counter to despair, a clarion call for transformers, a romp through our cultural materials, and an awakening for the assistance of the mythic. The writing game serves to help us encounter rather than deny the monstrous in our midst (Macy & Johnstone, 2012), plumbing the powers within the deep imagination, and calling out to the future beings, lending us courage and affirmation in a time of challenge, contention, danger, and - yes - possibility. The intent of the game is to regenerate culture and our sense of the possible. Game play invokes what Ed deBono called “lateral thinking” or a catalytic creativity juxtaposing highly unusual and dissimilar ideas to generate fresh thinking. Play involves one preparatory round of character creation, and then four rounds of writing. Each participant creates three characters: An Ecotopian (communitarian, sustainability culture dweller), a zombie, and a mythic figure. Each figure has characteristics such as perseverance, regeneration, resilience, creativity, strength, dexterity, and charisma. The group is writing a linked set of stories together within the same universe through dynamic interactions of the characters and emergent landscapes. During each round, or cycle, of play, participants author 300 or more words of story, and also write 100 or words of reflections on their experience.

Each cycle of play has a theme, one of the four layers of the systems thinking and deep imagination iceberg (Northwest Earth Institute, n.d.).

• Cycle 1. Sounding the Alarm: Habits, Habitats, and Encounters (Events layer)

• Cycle 2. Inside the Encounters, Rivalries, and Unlikely Partnerships (Patterns and trends layer)

• Cycle 3. Eruption and Reconnection: Liberating Structures - with Hidden Strengths Emerging (Structural layer)

• Cycle 4. Homecoming: Regenerating Cultures and Mindsets (Paradigm layer).

I have facilitated this game in graduate courses, though I see that it could be played in other community contexts as well. Usually it has been played over five class days. The storylines often break down binaries and generate innovative solutionaries. Some of the surprising turns of events include a whole narrative about zombies becoming healthy after a shift to veganism, as well as conversations about vaccine anxiety through characters wrestling with the complex ethics and unknowns of the anti-zombie vaccine.

Additional resources

• Link (earthregenerative.org) to the Ecotopia versus Zombie Apocalypse game guidelines.

• Link (docs.google.com) to slides of the 2021 presentation “Ecotopia v. Zombie Apocalypse” at North American Association of Environmental Educators Research Symposium.

Contact details

Dr. Hauk is interested in speaking to live audiences. You can contact her via her personal website: https://earthregenerative.org.