Title: One Hundred Days of Climate Action Conservation Biology On: 2007-08-01 The next President of the United States will face unprecedented challenges, among which is the looming threat of rapid climate destabilization. Given what is known about the pace of climate change, the President will have little or no margin for error and must act quickly, decisively, and wisely. Such was the conclusion of a small group convened at Wingspread in June of 2006 to discuss leadership and sustainability. Our conveners, Ray Anderson, Jonathan Lash, and Bill Becker intended to restart the dialogue begun in the 1990’s with the President’s Council on Sustainable Development. One of the outcomes of the meeting was the formation of an effort to define the first steps that must be taken by the new administration in 2009 to create and implement a climate action plan adequate to the emergency ahead. We chose to focus on the first hundred days to shed light on the critical importance of the first steps in a new direction. One model for action is that provided by the first one hundred days of the Roosevelt administration in 1933. Download PDF Read More... Title: The Carbon Connection Conservation Biology On: 2007-06-21 Having seen pictures of the devastation did not prepare me for the reality of New Orleans. Mile after mile of wrecked houses, demolished cars, piles of debris, twisted and downed trees, and dried mud everywhere. We stopped every so often to look into abandoned houses in the Ninth Ward and along the shore of Lake Pontchartrain, to see things close up: mud lines on the walls, overturned furniture, moldy clothes still hanging in closets, broken toys, a lens from a pair of glasses…once cherished and useful objects rendered into junk. Each house with a red circle painted on the front indicated results of the search for bodies. Some houses showed the signs of desperation: holes punched through ceilings as people tried to escape rising water. The smell of musty decay was everywhere, overlaid with an oily stench. Despair hung like Spanish moss in the dank, hot July air.< Download PDF Read More... Title: The Rhythm of Gratitude Oberlin Baccalaureate Address On: 2007-05-27 Fred Lassen caught me in the middle of a particularly busy day to ask whether I’d be willing to give the baccalaureate address this year. I agreed but five minutes later I wondered what it was that I’d agreed to do. These occasions call for a preacher which I am not, although some of my best relatives have been and one still is . . . But I am a talker increasingly reliant on powerpoint . . . what to do without a powerpoint? (Imagine if Moses had had powerpoint to present the Ten Commandments!) . . . a few weeks later Andy Barnett who has arranged the music asked me for a title. Not being particularly musical I recall being told one time or another that music had something to do with rhythm and since I’d been reading a book on gratitude . . . I responded by saying off the cuff “well my title is the “Rhythm of Gratitude” not knowing what that would entail. I’m hoping for serendipity. You are witness to my first . . . and probably my last . . . sermon. And it goes something like this. Download PDF Read More... Title: The Designers’ Challenge Commencement Address, School of Design, University of Pennsylvania On: 2007-05-14 Dean Hack, distinguished faculty of the School of Design, honored guests, and most important, you the members of the class of 2007. It is a great privilege to stand before you on your graduation day. As a Penn alumnus I feel a deep sense of affection for this institution and for this place. My own interest in design was kindled here long ago by Ian McHarg who as much as anyone was the founder of modern landscape design and the larger field of ecological design. His book Design with Nature remains a classic statement of the art of intelligent inhabitation. From its founding, the city of Philadelphia has been home to a great deal of innovative urban design and experimentation now carried on here in the School of Design. You are a part of a great history and have inherited a legacy of which you may be justly proud. But the work of designers is now entering its critical and most important phase. Download PDF Read More... Title: Optimism and Hope in a Hotter Time Conservation Biology Volume 21, No. 6, 2007 On: 2007-02-01 We like optimistic people. They are fun, often funny, and very often capable of doing amazing things otherwise thought to be impossible. Were I stranded on a life raft in the middle of the ocean and had a choice of a companion between an optimist and pessimist, I’d want an optimist, providing he did not have a liking for human flesh. Optimism, however, is often rather like Yankee fans believing that the team can win the game when it’s the bottom of the ninth; they’re up by a run, have two outs, a two strike count against a .200 hitter, and Mariano Rivera in his prime is on the mound. They are optimistic for good reason. Red Sox fans, on the other hand, believe in salvation by small percentages and hope for a hit to get the runner home from second base and tie the game. Optimism is the recognition that the odds are in your favor; hope is the faith that things will work out whatever the odds. Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. Hopeful people are actively engaged in defying or changing the odds. Optimism leans back, puts its feet up, and wears a confident look knowing that the deck is stacked. Download PDF Read More... Title: The Trial Conservation Biology 20 (6), 1570–1573. On: 2006-12-01 I once asked each of the students in my introductory environmental studies class to assume that they were the attorney representing Homo sapiens before a congress of all beings as once described by Joanna Macy and Jonathan Seed. The charge against us would read something like this: “Over many thousands of years humans have proved themselves incapable of living as citizens and members of the community of life and in recent centuries have become so numerous and so hazardous to other members of the community and the biosphere that they should be banished from the Earth for ever”. All the critters, reptiles, fish, birds, mammals, insects, and small things that make everything else work, are represented in the jury box equipped with sentience and voice. The presiding judge is an owl, said to be the wisest of all; the prosecuting attorney is a fox, said to be the most cunning. The question for my students is simply what defense might be made on our behalf? What supporting evidence could be presented? Who among the animals and plants would speak for us? Download PDF Read More... Title: Green Campuses/Green Minds: Improving the \'still unlovely human mind\' Keynote Address: Greening the Campus: Exploring Practices, Environmnetal Consortium of Hudson Valley Colleges and Universities On: 2006-11-21 David Orr: John, thank you for those kind words. I’m very glad to be here especially after the plane ride last night. As we started to land in high winds at the Westchester Airport I noticed that the pilot was to my right and the runway was straight ahead. And that’s not how you want these things to occur. So I was scrambling through my briefcase to find prayer beads or whatever solace might be available. We finally landed in Providence and I can say that it is very nice, indeed, to be here. But I missed hearing one of my heroes, Steve Curwood. \"Living on Earth\" has been one of the beacons of this movement. And for week after week, year by year, Steve has been one of the people who brought us good news, careful analysis, wider perspective. So Steve, thank you for what you’ve done so well for so long. I’ve been meaning to ask you though, the title, \"Living on Earth,\" what\\\'s the alternative? Is there a planet Cheney or something else out there? Well, there isn’t and that’s actually good news. We’ll have to learn, as you’ve said every week, to tend this one more carefully and more artfully. Download PDF Read More... Title: The Right to Life Conservation Biology, Volume 20, No. 4 On: 2006-08-01 For several decades Richard Posner, judge of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit, has been a prolific and often brilliant writer on law, literature, and politics. He is perhaps best known as an advocate for the use of economic standards as both a legal tool and a yardstick by which to measure judicial decisions. In clear prose and well-reasoned analysis, Judge Posner has advocated wealth creation as a reliable standard for legal reasoning along with a pragmatic view of political realities that defers substantially to prevailing practices and behaviors. Applied to politics, Posner’s pragmatism comes close to views once proposed by the economist Joseph Schumpeter, not otherwise known as a reformer. Posner’s position has been so forcefully and consistently stated for so long that it is surprising to read his book Catastrophe (Posner 2004) in which he concludes that the odds of the occurrence of one or more catastrophes are growing quickly. Among these, he includes the prospect of rapid climate change and admits that it “is to a significant degree a byproduct of the success of capitalism in enormously increasing the amount of world economic activity . . .and is a great and growing threat to anyone’s idea of human welfare” (2004). On this subject conservatives, he believes, are “in a state of denial.” The problem has come about, in part, because of the “scientific illiteracy of most nonscientists . . . [particularly] the people who count in making and implementing policy.” Download PDF Read More... Title: Framing Sustainability Conservation Biology 20 (2), 265–268. On: 2006-04-01 In June of 1858 Abraham Lincoln began his address at Springfield, Illinois by saying “If we could first know where we are, and whither we are tending, we could then better judge what to do and how, to do it.” He spoke on the issue of slavery that day with a directness that other politicians were loath to practice. At Springfield he asserted that “A house divided against itself cannot stand . . . this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.” His immediate targets were the evasions and complications of the Kansas-Nebraska Act of 1854 and the Supreme Court ruling handed down in the Dred Scott decision as well as those whom he accused of conspiring to spread slavery to states where it did not already exist. In his speech Lincoln accused Senator Stephen Douglas, President Franklin Pierce, Supreme Court Justice Roger Taney and President James Buchanan of a conspiracy to spread slavery supported by circumstantial evidence such that it was “impossible to not believe that Stephen and Franklin and Roger and James all understood one another from the beginning, and all worked upon a common plan or draft drawn up before the first lick was struck.” His opponent in the upcoming Senatorial election, Stephen Douglas, he described as a “caged and toothless” lion. Download PDF Read More... Title: What’s Left of Conservatism? The Commonweath/, San Francisco: The Commonwealth Club On: 2006-01-19 If the question is taken to mean what remains of conservatism after the past quarter of a century and particularly after the last six years, the answer is “not much.” After a run of tax cuts for people who didn’t need them, record deficits, an unnecessary and illegal war, corporate scandals, crony capitalism, congressional corruption, and public mismanagement by an ostensibly conservative administration the conservative movement is in a shambles. Grover Norquist the tax cutter who would drown our government in his bathtub is said to be unhappy about NSA spying on the public and the loss of civil liberties. He had apparently assumed that the ACLU would protect the Bill of Rights for him. Francis Fukuyama, for another, has abandoned the Neocon persuasion in frustration. A lot more will jump the good ship Cheney/Bush as it becomes obvious even to the dullest that a country cannot be run on debt, blood, mendacity, corruption, and incompetence for very long, and we’ve been at it for a while now. Download PDF Read More... Title: The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party Published on Wednesday, January 12, 2005 by CommonDreams.org On: 2005-01-12 Following the election of 2004, much has been made of the weaknesses of the Democratic Party, even its possible end. But it has escaped the notice of our blow-dry television pundits and political observers alike that the Republican Party, in the full blush of triumph in control of all the branches of government and large sections of the media, stands on the edge of certain extinction. The reasons grow daily more evident. Over the past three decades, the moderate, business-oriented party of Lincoln, Theodore Roosevelt, and Dwight Eisenhower was captured by its extreme rightwing thereby becoming a party dominated by ideologues, increasingly divorced from unmovable facts. But no organization, political party, or nation can long survive by ignoring realities of ecology, social justice, law, economics, and true security. Sooner or later, it will step off the proverbial curb into onrushing traffic of events, forces, and trends that it refused to see. Download PDF Read More... Title: The Hour before the Dawn Yes Magazine, Fall 2004 On: 2004-10-01 Hope, says author David W. Orr, is not the same as wishful thinking. Hope recognizes hard realities, like the difficulty of inventing a new energy future, but chooses to act anyway. Download PDF Read More... Title: The Learning Curve Resurgence Magazine Issue 226 On: 2004-09-01 All education is environmental education. THE MOST IMPORTANT discovery of the past two centuries is that we are joined in one fragile experiment, vulnerable to bad judgment, shortsightedness, greed and malice. Though divided by nation, tribe, religion, ethnicity, language, culture and politics, we are co-members of one enterprise stretching back through time beyond memory, but forward no further than our ability to recognize that we are, as Aldo Leopold once put it, plain members and citizens of the biotic community. Download PDF Read More... Title: The Corruption (and Redemption) of Science Conservation Biology 18 (4), 862–865. On: 2004-07-27 A recent investigation into the use of science by the Bush Administration alleges a systematic pattern of suppressing or distorting scientific evidence across a wide range of issues ( Union of Concerned Scientists 2004 ). The authors of the report further charge that the appointment of scientific advisors and members of advisory panels now serves interests other than the search for truth. Specifically, the report charges that there is: - a well-established pattern of suppression and distortion of scientific findings by high-ranking Bush Administration political appointees in many federal agencies; - a wide-ranging effort to manipulate the government's scientific advisory system; - and censorship on topics deemed sensitive to the administration's political "base." Download PDF Read More... Title: Law of the Land Published in the January/February 2004 issue of Orion magazine On: 2004-01-01 EACH OF US AMERICANS, on average, has 190 potentially toxic organochlorine compounds in our fatty tissue and body fluids, and several hundred other chemicals that may be harmful to our health. Although the Fourth Amendment to the United States Constitution protects “the right of people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects,” the privacy of the body has been violated without our knowledge or permission, and with little accountability by those responsible. Download PDF Read More... Title: The Case for the Earth from Resurgence Magazine Issue 219 On: 2003-07-01 TRADING STORIES one day about smart animals, I heard from an old farmer who described a wily fox that appeared at the edge of a clearing in which his dog was tethered to a pole in the yard. Inferring from the pattern of tracks, the empty dog dish, and the fact that the dog was bound up to the pole, he deduced that the fox had run in circles just outside the radius of the dog's tether until he had tied the dog up, at which point he strutted in to devour the dog's food while the helpless mutt looked on. Download PDF Read More... Title: Walking North on A Southbound Train School of Natural Resources - The University of Vermont On: 2003-04-01 Trading stories one day about animal smarts, I heard one from an old farmer who described a wily fox that appeared one day at the edge of a clearing in which his dog was tethered to pole in the yard. Inferring from the pattern of tracks, the empty dog dish, and the fact that the dog was bound up to the pole he deduced that the fox had run in circles just outside the radius of the dog's tether until he had tied the dog up at which point he strutted in to devour the dog's food while the helpless mutt looked on. Something like that has happened to all of us who believe nature and ecosystems to be worth preserving and that this is a matter of obligation, spirit, true economy, and common sense. Someone or something has run us in circles, tied us up, and is eating our lunch. It is time to ask who and why and how we might respond. Download PDF Read More... Title: Four Challenges of Sustainability Conservation Biology 16 (6), 1457–1460. On: 2002-12-01 The concept of sustainability first came to public notice in Wes Jackson's work on agriculture in the late 1970's, Lester Brown's Building a Sustainable Society (1980), and The World Conservation Strategy (Allen, 1980). The Brundtland Commission made it a central feature of its 1987 report defining it as meeting the needs of the present generation without compromising the ability of future generations to do the same (1987). Download PDF Read More... Title: Beauty is the Standard Resurgence Magazine Issue 210 On: 2002-01-01 We must love our children enough to design a world which instructs them towards community, ecology, responsibility, and joy. THE SKYMALL catalogue, conveniently available to bored airplane passengers, recently offered an item that spoke volumes about our approach to raising children. For a price of several hundred dollars parents could order a device that could be attached to a television set that would control access to the television. Each child would be given a kind of credit card, programmed to limit the hours he or she could watch TV. The child so disciplined would presumably benefit by imbibing fewer hours of mind-numbing junk. He or she might also benefit from the perverse challenge to discover the many exciting and ingenious ways to subvert the technology and the intention behind it, including a flank attack on parental rules and public decency via the internet. Download PDF Read More... Title: A Perspective from the Periphery The Onion Society, Thoughts on America, Writers Respond to Crisis, 2001 On: 2001-01-01 In the immediate aftermath of the devastating terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, over ninety percent of the U.S. public favored some kind of military action against the alleged perpetrators. The President calls the event an "act of war." Some in Congress are ready to suspend a sizeable part of our civil liberties in order to combat the threat of terrorism. There can be no question that those who commit criminal acts should be apprehended, fairly tried, and punished. That much is clear, but little else is. This is the time to reassess many things having to do with the underlying structure of political discontent that leads to terrorism, as well as the specific causes of our vulnerability. Why do so many of the poor around the world hate us? Why are we so vulnerable? Most important, what can we do to break the cycle of violence and create security in the largest possible sense of the word? Download PDF Read More... Title: Loving Children: A Design Problem This article was first published in Designer Builder, October 2000 On: 2000-10-01 The Skymall catalogue, conveniently available to bored airplane passengers, recently offered an item that spoke volumes about our approach to raising children. For a price of several hundred dollars, parents could order a device that could be attached to a television set that would control access to the television. Each child would be given a kind of credit card, programmed to limit the hours he or she could watch TV. The child so disciplined, would presumably benefit by imbibing fewer hours of mind numbing junk. They might also benefit from the perverse challenge to discover the many exciting and ingenious ways to subvert the technology and the intention behind it, including a flank attack on parental rules and public decency via the internet. Download PDF Read More... Title: Chronicle of Higher Education On: 2000-04-21 In the United States and many parts of the world, people with enough money can build whatever they choose. Zoning laws and various land-use restrictions are more often than not simply paper barriers, permeable by those with enough cash to buy connections. So deals are cut, and casinos spring up in places like mangrove wetlands along the Mississippi coast Download PDF Read More... Title: What Is Education For? One of the articles in The Learning Revolution (IC#27) On: 1991-02-01 We are accustomed to thinking of learning as good in and of itself. But as environmental educator David Orr reminds us, our education up till now has in some ways created a monster. This essay is adapted from his commencement address to the graduating class of 1990 at Arkansas College. It prompted many in our office to wonder why such speeches are made at the end, rather than the beginning, of the collegiate experience. David Orr is the founder of the Meadowcreek Project, an environmental education center in Fox, AR, and is currently on the faculty of Oberlin College in Ohio. Reprinted from Ocean Arks International's excellent quarterly tabloid Annals of Earth, Vol. VIII, No. 2, 1990. Subscriptions $10/year from 10 Shanks Pond Road, Falmouth, MA 02540. 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