David Orr's Vision of the Next Frontier of Campus...

Thu, 04 Aug 2011 13:04:15 -0400
interviews

Full Title: David Orr's Vision of the Next Frontier of Campus Sustainability
Below is a short excerpt of an interview with Oberlin College's David Orr, who braved a tornado warning in Ohio this spring to talk with AASHE about the innovative Oberlin Project. Read the whole interview in AASHE's newest publication: "2010 Campus Sustainability Review."

In the late 1990s, David Orr organized the design of the Adam J. Lewis Center at Oberlin College in northeastern Ohio, the first entirely solar-powered building on a U.S. college campus. Today, the author, speaker and Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President at Oberlin College is pioneering the next frontier of campus sustainability with The Oberlin Project. This ambitious green development effort aims to revitalize a 13-acre city block in downtown Oberlin. By combining urban revitalization, green development, sustainable agriculture, sustainable energy, education and arts into a single project, the collaborative effort is at the forefront of a national trend to broaden the scope of the campus sustainability movement. AASHE’s Tim Gibbins caught up with David this spring in the midst of a tornado warning in Ohio to learn more about this innovative new project.

Q: Can you give us the background on The Oberlin Project?

A: The Oberlin Project has five goals. One is to transform the local economy in central downtown doing the entire block at USGBC [U.S. Green Building Council] Platinum levels for neighborhood development and use that as a driver for the local economy. This means building the block in a way that ties into local providers for wood materials, energy, food and so forth. The second goal is to move the city and the college to carbon neutrality and reinvent the local energy system in the city. That includes regulation, pricing, incentives for efficiency and deploying different kinds of technology. The third goal is to develop a 20,000-acre greenbelt around the city, primarily for agriculture but also for forestry. The fourth goal is to use the entire project as an educational venture including students from not just the college, but the public schools and vo-tech [vocational technical] schools and a two-year college as well. So we’ve put together a consortium of different kinds of educational institutions. The fifth goal is to devise ways to replicate this across the country in a variety of different ways.

Q: What are some of those ways?

A: For one, we are part of the Clinton Climate Initiative as one of 19 projects worldwide. Second is the development of an ecological design center that is a bridge between the Oberlin Project and other redevelopment efforts around the upper Midwest. Third, we are developing a national network that propagates the idea of “full-spectrum sustainability,” which means a lot of conversations that cross the boundaries of organizations, bureaucracies and disciplines by which we organized the industrial world.

We have created 10 teams throughout the city and five throughout the northeast Ohio region made up of public citizens, foundations, faculty members and government officials working on community organization, energy issues, economic development, development of green buildings, ecological design and so forth. Full-spectrum sustainability means that any particular issue that comes up is going to involve three or four of the different teams. Citizen engagement in the early stages has been pretty good. We are a very typical upper Midwest city with similar rates of ethnic makeup, income distribution and poverty that characterize this region. We have not had much difficulty in getting people to respond, which reflects the vitality of volunteerism and civic spirit that is often underestimated. One of the objectives of the plan is to develop a civic commons that develops participation and leadership throughout the whole community.

Q: What do you think is one of the major drivers of all the volunteers wanting to get involved?

A: I think there is more activism in the public than we have often assumed. People want to get involved, the problem, typically, is that there is just no good way to do it. In our project we began with five, six, seven different things happening, providing multiple opportunities for engagement. The educational teams, for example, are going to be working on curriculum asking what kids need to know at the onset of a climate-destabilized world. There are plans for a new green school built much like the Adam J. Lewis center. Other people are working on the local food system and how the cafeteria is provisioned throughout the school year. The point, however, is that there is a lot more desire to get engaged than has often been assumed.

Q: Part of The Oberlin Project that seems atypical to what we normally think of as a part of the sustainability movement is the inclusion of the arts, and this Green Arts District. What do you see as the primary role that the arts will play in the sustainability movement in the future?

A: The conversation about sustainability has mostly focused on sustainable agriculture or renewable energy or green building, and the list goes on. We’ve brought all of these together into a single pattern where the parts are designed to reinforce the prosperity and resilience of the whole thing. It’s just one big conversation but so far it’s been pretty wonky—full of technical and scientific jargon, a lot of curves going up or down. But such things only appeal to one side of the mind. What it misses is the part of the mind that is creative and artistic. The union between the performing arts, plastic arts, music, drama, literary arts and the sciences may be one of the most vital and powerful things that will come out of The Oberlin Project...

The "2010 Campus Sustainability Review" is the first of AASHE's e-book offerings. Download the publication here.