2025 GCIC Academic Symposium

When we are brought up to equate “good living,” “living well,” or “living to our potential” with material gains if not material wealth, it becomes impossible to see life as anything other than a race for accumulation or even excess. Greed, avarice, and materialism are difficult to ward off when we are conditioned to consume, hoard, and profit.

Counter to living this way means living in symbiosis and reciprocity. To live in symbiosis and reciprocity means to exist in communion or to live with rather than off of or from.

Human ingenuity is at once a part of the problem and solution here. We humans imagine worlds and will the knowledge necessary to manifest imagination into existence. Human ingenuity is greedy in its insatiability. We have a difficult time being content when our imagination is unencumbered. How do we then corral a dream? Can we dream of symbiotic and reciprocal futures? Can human dreams imagine equilibrium or a middle way that is neither complacent nor exploitive?

While greed is a natural human trait that preserves the self above all else, how do we learn to preserve in more sustainable, just ways? How do we learn to expand the borders of “we” to involve all humans and non-humans? All things both living and not but still a part of our ecologies? How do we learn to revere this opportunity to live on earth while treasuring the treasures living here yield?

This year’s theme, “Subverting Greed: Living Not on but in Communion with Earth,” asks us to pause and take stock of where we are in the world right now. What have we accomplished as a people? What have we accomplished as a nation? Of what are we proud? What is undignified? To what do we feel entitled and why?

This year’s theme asks that we interrogate one of our most human assumptions: What does it mean to be greedy? How do we “subvert” it? What does it mean to live “in communion”? What does it mean to live “with” Earth rather than on it?

Here are a few questions that can help extend your thinking but feel free to develop your own:

• What can the sciences, human and behavioral sciences, the humanities, the fine arts, and the workforce tell us about greed and/or living well while doing or being “good”?
• What are the benefits and challenges of greed? What are the benefits and challenges of living sustainably?
• Who is included when we consider “sustainability”?
• What do the sciences, human and behavioral sciences, the humanities, the fine arts, and the workforce tell us about reciprocity and symbiosis?

This year’s theme is broad and lends itself to cross-disciplinary examination which is the driving force of our academic symposium.