As somebody who has lived a long time immersed in climate data and environmental information and has lived with your nose up against the reality of that for a long time, how do you cope with that? What are your coping mechanisms? Knowing what you know, how does it affect how you live your life?
There is something to TS Elliot’s statement that humankind cannot bear too much reality. Not totally, but clearly if you come down with cancer or heart disease you want the truth. Ecological truths are harder for us to absorb and the pain of the world, not many of us can face this. A Canadian wildlife guy, John Livingstone, wrote some brilliant stuff, he really felt nature, and when he saw what was happening, extinctions and so forth, he wrote these outraged, impassioned columns, but it always amazes me that more people aren’t angry about this.
How do you see the relationship between sustainability and resilience as concepts? Is resilience part of sustainability? Is sustainability part of resilience?
I guess for me sustainability is kind of a boring word but we’re stuck with it. But I tend to like resilience because it implies an active disposition to be able to withstand, it’s more of an engineering and mathematical term, but to be able to withstand disturbances. Some parameters change, some factors shift, and the system is able to adjust. There’s enough slack in the system that it works. So for me, at a minimum, sustainability implies resilience. In any definition of sustainability the system has got to be resilient to disturbances.
David Orr in London. Note the offending highly energy wasteful chandeliers behind him (referred to in the interview)
David Orr was in the UK recently, and the two of us were part of a panel at an event organised by the Prince’s Foundation for the Built Environment. After the event, we retired to the bar of a rather grand London hotel, and chatted for an hour about energy, climate change, the Precautionary Principle, Transition and whether or not we are beyond talk of ’solutions’. Part two will follow shortly.
So, how would you introduce yourself?
I’m David Orr. I teach at Oberlin College in Ohio and I also work as Senior Advisor to the President of the college on environmental issues generally, but specifically on the redevelopment of the town and the college to carbon neutrality, a 20,000 acre green belt and the revitalised downtown corridor.
A fabulous piece by Richard Heinberg. Great to read him being optimistic, well. in a Heinbergy kind of way. I also read this piece as an early, brief version of the history of the peak oil/relocalisation/Transition movement that someone will inevitably write one day…. One correction though, ‘Transition Handbook’ wasn’t my PhD, unfortunely I am still flogging away at that!!
In 2008 the U.S. economy tripped down a steep, rocky slope. Employment levels plummeted; so did purchases of autos and other consumer goods. Property values crashed; foreclosure and bankruptcy rates bled. For states, counties, cities, and towns; for manufacturers, retailers, and middle- and low-income families, the consequences were—and continue to be—catastrophic. Other nations were soon caught up in the undertow.
While Chris Martenson was in the UK recently, Peter Lipman and myself did an interview with him, which was fascinating and wonderful, but the memory chip it was on just got corrupted before I could download it and it is lost. Gah. As a meagre way of overcoming the profound sense of trauma I am left with (I will try and do it again via. skype sometime soon), here is a film of the talk he did later that day in the Grand Committee Room at the Houses of Parliament for the All Party Parliamentary Group on Peak Oil and Gas. For now, you’ll just have to imagine how brilliant our interview was.
How might our response to peak oil and climate change look more like a party than a protest march? This site explores the emerging transition model in its many manifestations
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As somebody who has lived a long time immersed in climate data and environmental information and has lived with your nose up against the reality of that for a long time, how do you cope with that? What are your coping mechanisms? Knowing what you know, how does it affect how you live your life?
