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Bringing David Orr to Campus, April 28

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Posted on Friday, April 24, 2015

Westminster College’s environmental program seminar series will welcome David Orr ’65 to campus on April 28.

Orr, environmentalist, author and educator, will present his discussion at 7 p.m. in Witherspoon-Maple Room in McKelvey Campus Center, focusing on topics including ecological sustainability, environmentalism, and threats to future generations posed by humanity’s current unsustainable lifestyles, found in his most recent books, Hope is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse. Afterward, his books will be on sale and available for signing. The event is free and open to the public.

A leader in sustainable economic development, Orr helped spearhead The Oberlin Project, a town-gown collaboration aimed at revitalizing Oberlin, Ohio and the Lake Erie Crescent Initiative, a regional revitalization project involving industrial cities along the western Erie shore. Both initiatives have helped redirect investments to support more rapid deployment of renewable energy, a local foods economy, and green building.

Orr earned a bachelor’s degree in History from Westminster College, a master’s of arts degree from Michigan State University, and a Ph.D. in international relations from the University of Pennsylvania. He is currently “Counselor to the President” at Oberlin College and the Steven A. Minter fellow at the Cleveland Foundation. He is the author of seven books and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 200 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications.

In the past twenty-five years, he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Currently, he is a Trustee of the Bioneers, Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and the WorldWatch Institute.

Orr has been awarded eight honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council and from Second Nature. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” and as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy. He is founder and Chair of the Board of the Oberlin Project and a founding editor of the journal Solutions.

For more information about the event, email watsonll@westminster.edu or call (724) 946-6279.