Using science and creative writing, OSU’s “Transformation without Apocalypse” symposium will discuss different ways mankind can improve its relationship with the planet. The Spring Creek Project will host the symposium this weekend in Corvallis.

The symposium, which is free and open to the public, will feature keynote speakers such as Tim DeChristopher, who is known for sabotaging a 2008 auction of public lands in Utah, authors Ursula K. Le Guin and Kim Stanley Robinson and philosopher, author and co-founder of the Spring Creek Project Kathleen Dean Moore, who will talk Saturday morning about different scenarios of combating climate change.

“I’m going to start by saying that we are going to be the writers of the story of this decade,” Moore says, “a decade that is critical to this planet.” She says that her “suggestion is to make it a love story.”

Moore says that she hopes her talk will provide “hope and determination and a little bit of strategy” to her guests.

“We know our keynote speakers are going to knock people’s socks off, make their hair stand on the back of their necks and leave them inspired and go home and think, ‘Man, what can I do to help change the future?’” Spring Creek Project Director Charles Goodrich says.

The symposium will also offer workshops where guests will be able to take the ideas they learn and engage them with their community. Over 30 environmental and social justice groups will be tabling and providing activities so that guests can use “radical reimagining” when it comes to the environment.

“We hope everyone will go home with connections that will help them stay involved and put their shoulders to the wheel,” Goodrich says.

The symposium begins at 1 pm Friday, Feb. 14, at the LaSells Stewart Center C&E Hall and at 10 am Saturday, Feb. 15, at the center’s Austen Auditorium. For more information and to register for workshops go to http://wkly.ws/1or.