David W. Orr
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David W. Orr

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I am a bookaholic. From my earliest years my life has been filled with books, reading, bookstores, conversations about books, and writing a few of my own. Reading opens windows to people, places, thoughts, happenings, and things I’d otherwise never know. I have seldom met an uninteresting subject although I have read a few dull writers. I read for the pleasure of being instructed, inspired, and enlivened. Early on I was captivated by history and biography. Later in graduate school I read Joseph Wood Krutch, Lewis Mumford, Paul Sears, Ian McHarg, Rachel Carson, Barry Commoner, Rene Dubos, Wendell Berry, E. F. Schumacher, Eugene Odum, among others. In various ways they put into words what I’d often felt as a kid growing up in the hills, farms, and hemlock forests of Western Pennsylvania. That was the late 1960s and early 1970s and the dawn of the modern environmental movement. I have been preoccupied with the role of humans in the environment ever since. How do we live in harmony with our places—and with each other—in ways that are just, fair, decent, and beautiful. The human role in nature raises other questions about what makes us tick. My interest in such things was a doorway into philosophy, religion, ethics, history, politics, anthropology, sociology, economics, biology, and ecology—broadly called the liberal arts. I did my Ph.D. work in political science, specifically International Relations. After graduate school my academic writings focused on issues of the politics and policy of environment and energy issues. Living in Atlanta in the 1970s a colleague and I organized two City-wide symposia on the limits to growth, land use, and the future of the metropolitan region. Later, as a young professor at the University of North Carolina I began to write about the politics of ecology, greatly influenced by the writings of William Ophuls, Lynton Caldwell, and Robert Heilbroner among others. I left academia in 1979 to start a 1500 acre venture with my brother Wilson. The Meadowcreek Project, Inc. was located in the Ozarks about 100 miles north of Little Rock. We built a 25,000ft2 Conference Center and operated a 250 acre cattle farm, with a small sawmill. We intended to build a model of sustainability as the core of an environmental education center focused on the issues of sustainability. The place itself was the curriculum. So, if it had anything to do with how we farmed, built, managed 1000+ acres of forest, managed the land, or earned our keep it was a part of the program for the ~2000 students, conference attendees, and visitors we hosted each year. Among other programs we co-sponsored with then Governor Bill Clinton the first conference for bankers and climate scientists in 1988. Hillary Clinton was the featured speaker in a January term on “Gender and Power.” We also hosted major conferences for NY foundations on sustainability, and others on theology and environment, January terms for college students, and helped to launch the green campus movement in the late 1980s Our regular participants included Wes Jackson, Wendell Berry, Amory and Hunter Lovins, John and Nancy Todd, Donella Meadows, Herman Daly and dozens of others. It was a profound experience for me and many others. Since 1990, I have been a Professor in the Environmental Studies Program and Counselor to the President of Oberlin since 2007. In those roles I was instrumental in the design, funding, and building of the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, the first substantially green building on a U.S. College campus and powered entirely by sunlight. More recently as a founder of the Oberlin Project and presently Chair of the Board, I’ve been involved in the effort to forge a partnership between the College, the City, and the community to make Oberlin a model of sustainable, renewably powered prosperity. My first two books, Ecological Literacy (SUNY, 1992) and Earth in Mind (Island Press, 1994) were about education premised on the idea that “all education is environmental education—what is included or excluded teaches that we are part of or apart from the natural world.” My next two books The Nature of Design (Oxford, 2002) and Design on the Edge (MIT, 2006) dealt with ecological design and the making of the Lewis Center. The core idea running through both is that design is a form of pedagogy and powerfully influences what we think about. A fifth book The Last Refuge (Island Press, 2005) is my complaint what passed for national leadership at the beginning of the 21st century. Many of the essays I wrote for Conservation Biology over nearly a quarter century are collected in Hope is an Imperative (Island, 2010). Climate change is the subject of Down to the Wire (Oxford, 2008) and Dangerous Years (Yale, 2016). In both the core idea is that rapid climate destabilization is a symptom of deeper flaws in western culture embedded in our politics, economy, education, and underlying philosophy. I read for pleasure stimulated by an unruly curiosity. I write to help organize my thoughts and to make what sense I can of the world of “the long emergency.” I have been influenced by more people than I can possibly name over more years than I’d care to admit. I am testimony to the fact that no person is an island. I am grateful to be connected to a continent of wonderful people, great writers, incandescent thinkers, and warm-hearted and generous friends.
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