Oberlin, Ohio
David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus and senior advisor to the president of Oberlin College. He is a founding editor of the journal Solutions, and founder of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity and sustainability of Oberlin.
Orr is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward (Yale University Press, 2017), Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009), Design with Nature (Oxford, 2002), Earth in Mind (Island, 2004) and co-editor of five others, including Democracy Unchained (The New Press, 2020) and Democracy in a Hotter Time (MIT Press, 2023). He has also written over 250 articles, reviews, book chapters and professional publications.
In the past 25 years, Orr has served as a board member or advisor to eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He is a trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado and the Children and Nature Network.
Orr has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards, including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation and a Visionary Leadership Award from Second Nature. He is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the United States, Europe and Asia.
While at Oberlin, he spearheaded 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 30 years,” and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy and was instrumental in funding the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center.