Dr. David Orr: 0:00
The hard part, I think, for our generation is to realize that we cast a long and very dark shadow on the future. It is a moral issue like no other. It’s now global and it is now long-term. Carbon stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years and we’ve never faced an issue like that, where it’s so stark. But the same could be said of moral issues, those things that we did way back, when the words that we spoke, the effects rippled out over time. The past has never passed.
Bishop Wright: 1:08
, michigan State . Among a long list of distinctions at Oberlin College and presently Professor of Practice at Arizona State
Dr. David Orr: 2:47
I think the long story short is an attempt to find ways to connect the dots in a very confusing time. How do we get the signal out of all the noise, so to speak? How do we find our way? All the noise, so to speak? How do we find our way? It feels a little bit like this culture’s on a car on a dark night on a high mountain road, moving at high speed, and we’re trying to find our way to lighten the way forward, and I think there are lots of ways to see that. But in my case it’s been a journey and I think it’s more of a pilgrimage.
Bishop Wright: 3:30
Yeah, you’re a person of faith and your PhD is in international relations, and so how did we get to climate work and environmental work from international relations?
Dr. David Orr: 3:45
Well, it’s a good question and I don’t think there’s an easy answer to that. But it was reading a lot of people. It was hanging out with people who were in the science community. I lived in Atlanta back in the 70s. I worked out of Jimmy Carter’s office for a time on environmental issues and then it was a small, very small part of his transition team before we went into the White House. And, rob, we knew enough in those days to do a lot better on climate and justice issues than we have done.
Dr. David Orr: 4:13
And President Carter came into the campaign office in September of 1976. He was up in the polls by seven or eight points. He came over and we talked for a bit. He asked for a paper on the most important environmental issue his administration would face. He was up over Gerald Ford at that time by a fair margin. The race later narrowed.
Dr. David Orr: 4:36
So I said, in effect, that’s beyond my pay grade, but I’d be happy to assemble people who know these things. And so we did Cecil Phillips, who was the chairman of the Georgia Conservancy at that time, and I assembled a group of eight or nine people Amory Lovins and Herman Daly and Eugene Odom from the University of Georgia, famous ecologists. We drafted a paper the Wolf Creek Statement that 50-some years later still reads well 50-some years later still reads well. We proposed a path forward by essentially putting in a tax on fossil fuels at the port of entry or mine mouth or the wellhead that would gradually rise over time, so people would know that this is gonna be more and more expensive to burn fossil fuels and that tax then would be prorated and given back to people according to income and poverty levels. So it would be taking money from fossil fuel extraction and importing and so forth and giving that back to the poor people.
Dr. David Orr: 5:35
So it essentially solved two problems. One is a poverty problem that’s endemic in America and the other is a burgeoning or growing climate crisis. But that of course didn’t happen. But Carter made I think it was good an attempt to try to get those things through in the four years he had. But it’s a long answer to a good question. But I think the search here was trying to connect the dots between what we do, how we live, how we govern and our responsibilities to each other and to the future.
Bishop Wright: 6:09
That’s a great segue for me at least, because, you know, this January I’ve been thinking a lot about Dr King and I’ve been thinking about what moral leadership is, and so broadly defined and not exclusive to Christians, but, you know, an invitation to all people of all goodwill and all good faith, this idea of moral leadership. So how is this climate work, environmental work and sustainability work? How is that moral leadership or how’s that moral work? I should start.
Dr. David Orr: 6:39
Dr King gave a commencement talk at Oberlin, where I taught for 27 years, in 1965. It was a bit of a prelude to a talk he gave a year or two later, talking about time, the urgency of time. Time is not our friend. There’s such a thing, as he said, as being too late. That raises an issue, and I think Dr King’s life was such a magnificent exhibition of courage. And courage, aristotle told us a long time ago, is the foundation for all the other virtues. You have to have a spinal column, you have to stand up.
Dr. David Orr: 7:20
And King’s leadership, and that also Robert Kennedy at that time, there were some magnificent leaders that could have taken this country in a very different direction, but it was a matter and, as I understand King’s writings, he was moving in a radical direction. He saw the Vietnam War more clearly than most anybody else did at that time and he spoke out on it. It didn’t make him popular To the contrary, than most anybody else did at that time and he spoke out on it. It didn’t make him popular To the contrary. But what he was doing was to begin to describe this pattern that connects things and a pattern of moral failure.
Dr. David Orr: 7:55
And so it’s not a long step from looking at King’s life and record and words and seeing the pattern that connected climate change with racism and colonialism and extraction.
Dr. David Orr: 8:10
This was a pattern that began a long time ago, I think. To deal with climate change in any kind of coherent way, we have to understand that we’re related to all that ever was or is or will be. We can’t escape, we can’t secede from the human race and its origins or its destiny, and King was pointing that out and connecting economic travail here in the United States with the suffering of Vietnamese peasants who were fighting bombs and imperialism and so forth and lots of difficulties that we imposed on them, and that’s the essence of the whole thing. Climate change is simply the upshot. So if you build an economy based on combustion of fossil fuels and extraction of materials and maximum economic growth with minimum oversight, then the fires in LA this past week become just a logical occurrence. You build an economy on oppression, then you’re going to get lots of other things. It’s the rules of the game, in other words, and if the rules emphasize growth at all costs, based on combustion and inequality, then what you’re going to get is kind of what we see in the daily headlines.
Bishop Wright: 9:48
If you read King back to 1955, when he steps out on the stage to lead the Montgomery bus boycott, you know this idea of interrelatedness, you see it, you see him thinking about it and working it through, and then right down to we lose him. You know, on a balcony in Memphis, this radical interrelatedness and consciousness of interrelatedness, you know, the other thing King says that comes to mind as you speak is is that change does not run, you know, does not run in on the wheels of inevitability, right? So? So moral choices have to be made for sustainability, and so is that what it is, I mean, because this thing has been politicized so much that it’s been pushed to the side by some, poo-pooed by others, you know, been sort of labeled as not thoughts for sound thinkers. I mean. So where are you at in all of that? Is that just sort of big business, pushing something that is really urgent to the side so they can keep on printing the money and we can keep on living at our own peril? How do you read that?
Dr. David Orr: 11:07
He was in Memphis for those few days as part of a, if I remember correctly, a garbage union, garbage workers union strike. That’s right and that has a kind of eerie quality to it because we live in a throwaway society and we throw our trash away and they would pick it up. We throw people away and no one picks it up, and so that was kind of the symbolism of that I think is very striking. On the moral leadership and so forth, this was the most striking thing about King to me was how young he was and how prescient he was. And young people, you think, when you’re 25 or 30, you’re young and you had a career stretching out before you and all the things you’re going to do in life and so forth. He didn’t do that. He was aware. I think what I read of his biography is he was aware that his life would be short and yet he sacrificed it.
Dr. David Orr: 11:58
But as I trace and you know much more about his life than I do but as I trace his life and writings, there was a progressive radicalization, and by radicalization I mean getting to the root of the issue. Part of the problem that we have to reckon with is injustice, and that injustice bubbles up in oligarchy, it bubbles up in oppression, inequality. And now the hard part, I think, for our generation is to realize that we cast a long and very dark shadow on the future. And it is a moral issue like no other. It’s now global and it is now long-term. Carbon stays in the atmosphere for thousands of years, so 25% of the carbon that we release today on our various activities and so forth will be in the atmosphere a thousand years from now, and we’ve never faced an issue like that, so stark. But the same could be said of moral issues. So those things that we did way back when, the words that we spoke, the effects ripple out over time, and there’s no William Faulkner said this in a passage more poetic than I can recall to say it, but that the past has never passed. The sins and the good things that we did ripple forward in time, but we’re never free of it. But in this case, rob, climate change to me is a sum total of all of our failures. It’s not just a biological thing, although it is that. It’s the sum total of what we’ve done on the planet. I can’t say that we weren’t warned. The warnings go back.
Dr. David Orr: 13:37
The climate science began in the 19th century, but a Swede by the name of Savanti Arrhenius did the basic calculations in 1897 that are still ballpark accurate plus or minus 5 or 10 percent. He got it right you burn so much coal and oil and so forth, you’ll get such and such a warming. Now, as a Swede, he thought that was a good thing. It would warm things up a little bit, but now we know it’s trending to out of control. And the scary thing something that ought to scare everybody is what happened beginning in 2023, when the warming took a sharp jump upward for no known reason and scientists are still trying to figure that out and it continued into 2024.
Dr. David Orr: 14:19
So we have 2024 as the hottest year on record, 2023 the second hottest year on record, not by a little bit, but by a great deal, and so the effort to understand this scientifically must move and this gets into your realm. It must become the moral challenge of our time. It connects everything else we’ve done. Climate change is about colonialism. It’s about racism, it’s about inequality. It’s about poverty. It’s about racism, it’s about inequality, it’s about poverty. It’s about war. All of these things are directly and indirectly connected to the combustion, the economy built around combustion and exploitation.
Bishop Wright: 14:56
David, what do you say to people who may be listening who agree with at least one satirist I heard who said that this kind of conversation is the height of arrogance? Who are we to think that our sort of day-to-day living could have an impact like you’re describing or like you’ve written about, on our, on our world? You know this this world has has gone through. You know it’s gone through incredible upheaval, ice ages, it’s. It’s gone through, you know, a near obliteration of all species, to have some species crawl their way back into existence, et cetera. So you know, some are arguing this is just the height of arrogance. That we think that you know the cars we drive and how we dispose of our trash, et cetera, is going to have some sort of long-lasting effect. What do you say to those folks?
Dr. David Orr: 15:52
Well, I think there are two responses. One is when you look at the record simply the scientific record what we’re doing to the Earth is happening. It’s happened before. There have been worm spells before, but not since we’ve been on the planet. So you go back 800,000 years if you use the ice core record. If you use a little bit different record and more inferential data, you can go back several million years. We’re where we’ve never been before. The scary thing is it’s happening faster than it ever happened before. We’re doing it in a matter of decades what took tens of thousands of years Now.
Dr. David Orr: 16:27
The second thing, rob, is this there’s a tendency in Western culture and I think we got a lot of this from Thomas Jefferson and other people to celebrate the individual, and that’s good to a point. Now we’re at an issue where we have to balance pronouns I, me and mine, with we, ours and us. That’s the difficulty, because now we’re reckoning with collective sin and we’ve thought for so long that salvation was simply a matter of the individual being right with God and Jesus and so forth, or behaving in a certain way individually. But salvation was always an individual thing. We have to see it as a collective thing and our behavior. Yes, it does matter what you drive, it does matter how you vote, it does matter what you throw away and what you keep. Every matter, every instance of kindness matters. But it matters now not just individually but collectively. And that’s hard to get us around because you have to fight through a lot of philosophical layering and beliefs that are all too convenient.
Dr. David Orr: 17:35
And, rob, part of the issue and I’m getting off on a tangent here, but part of the issue is we’ve been advertised at for so long and the advertising industry, since Edward Bernays, who was a nephew of Sigmund Freud, learned how to tap into our reptilian brainstem, we’re sold things not by rationality but by appeal to the seven deadly sins. Appeal to the seven deadly sins, and so we’ve been brainwashed and we see, I’m told something like 5,000,. We’re exposed to something like 5,000 commercial messages every day. Now I don’t know if that number is correct, but let’s say it’s half right 2,500 commercial messages. To take care of number one, we do it all for you. You deserve a break today, 2,500,.
Dr. David Orr: 18:17
And so then we send our kids off to school or Sunday school and a teacher will have them for an hour or two in a class, and that can’t undo that constant bombardment of advertising, which is incredibly clever, and now they’re going to use AI to sell us even more stuff. So this is an attempt the largest attempt ever to corrupt the human mind and soul, and that’s a spiritual issue, because the results occur in our behavior and show up in the climate record, and so these things are linked in ways that are, when you think about it, fairly obvious, but they’re all mostly insidious, and what you do as the leader of the Episcopal Church in Atlanta, georgia, in the nation, the leader of the Episcopal Church in Atlanta, georgia, in the nation, contends with this tsunami of enticement to do otherwise.
Bishop Wright: 19:10
That brings me to this question. You know they say that the prophets, right, the biblical prophets, those great Hebrew prophets it wasn’t that they saw around the corner, they didn’t have a crystal ball, but what they did see is they saw into now really deeply, and that’s what it sounds like you’re talking about. Is that we look into now really deeply? Then we have some way to think about what’s coming down the pike, based on a deep understanding and interpretation of now. You wrote some time ago some years ago I’m guessing that our job is not to depress students but to tell them the truth as best we see it, right. So how do you thread that needle? Because you know, when you start to really drill down into the facts and figures, what science is saying about where we are. And you know, connecting to your earlier comment about Dr King, that we may be, in some regard, even past the moment to change some things.
Bishop Wright: 20:12
How do you not depress and inspire some hope and inspire some positive, you know behaviors going forward, even though you’ve got to tell them the truth
Dr. David Orr: 20:22
I once wrote something that I uh it was part of the pedagogy of, I think I put it that hope is a verb with the sleeves rolled up and the only hopeful people legitimately hopeful people I know are people actually doing things. And last night I gave a talk, uh, to 100 or so folks here in Oberlin. And on one side there’s Jack Nicholson in that scene from a movie, a Few Great Men, and Tom Cruise has him on the stand. It’s a Hail Mary, legal pass and he’s got one chance to win the case or he blows it and he gets Nicholson to say you can’t handle the truth. On the other side of the screen I was doing this in PowerPoint there’s Winston Churchill who goes on BBC in 1940, the bombs falling on London, and he says I don’t have a thing to offer you but blood, toil and tears and sweat. Now I don’t know what the right communication strategy is, but Mark Twain once said when in doubt, tell the truth, it will amaze your friends and confound your enemies.
Dr. David Orr: 21:24
One of the things that we did at Oberlin back in the 1990s and 2000s was to get these young people involved in the design of a solar-powered building, and so we had design charrettes. So what kind of building do you want to be educated in? Well, they wanted sunlight. Well, do you know where you live? This is Ohio. Sunshine is a theory, so, but anyway, the building was built. It became the first entirely solar powered building on the US college campus. It’s a zero discharge building. We process all our wastewater and it was educational all kinds of ways. But the students participated with the architects and engineers that built the building. We’re now coming up to the 25th year of that project, so we put together a AGALC Adam Joseph Lewis Center 2.0 project to rebuild it.
Dr. David Orr: 22:08
Now, rob, your question gets to the heart of things. If we just give kids bad news, we’ve raised the energy level and that goes off into despair. We have to give them good work to do, and Lord knows there is good work to do. It’s down the street, it’s with your neighbor, it’s in your city. We’re not suffering from lack of opportunity to do good work, but I think engaging young people in doing the good work and doing it in John Lewis’s sense of necessary trouble, you do the good work. Martin Luther King was killed because he was I was in trouble and he was up standing up for the garbage workers in Memphis and the poor and speaking out for Vietnamese peasants and so forth. That was good work, but that was necessary work. And I think, rather than give kids the idea you can have a fun, exciting life and you can make a lot of money with a college degree, I think they look for purpose and in that purpose and you don’t guarantee them success. That’s not true, rob.
Dr. David Orr: 23:11
We held a meeting here. We’re doing something called the Oberlin Project and we had a meeting. It was a public meeting. We had as background Danella Meadows, who was a friend of mine that died all too early in life, but she’d written an essay called Places to Intervene in the System. So, if you want to move a system, where do you intervene? And he had a list of 13,.
Dr. David Orr: 23:31
And you start up here at the top with things you do to change policy and you get down to the bottom, changing paradigms. Well, you are about changing paradigms are about changing paradigms the way you see the world, not as an independent thing where you’re a voyeur, but as a participant on the field of play. But that’s where you get shot, that’s where you take criticisms and so to work through. What we were trying to do was to get the community to think through. Where do you intervene in this system called Oberlin, ohio, small town of 9,000 people, a great little college, an air traffic control center? So where do you intervene in this system and the cause of justice and righteousness and fairness and decency and beauty and fun? Because it ought to be a celebration, yeah, it shouldn’t be long-faced and all that.
Dr. David Orr: 24:16
So the idea was not to make this or Danila Meadows’ list of 13 scriptural. You could argue it because she had. One of the things she had at the top of the list was changing the laws. Well, the Voting Rights Act of 1965 changed the laws, but it also changed behavior and paradigm. So it’s not a clear definition. It gets people thinking where do I put my energies to have maximum effect? good effect and part of it could be at any scale.
Dr. David Orr: 24:43
You could be growing gardens, community gardens, and feeding people. You could be in Congress and trying to fight for legislation and decency and so forth. You could be in the church and begin to do what the root word for religion, I think, means to bind together, and the word whole is close to holiness and health, and so these things are combined, and so I see the church and your work so brilliantly in this, attempting to bring this wholeness together. This is where all the connections go.
Bishop Wright: 25:16
It has to. And I think that the longer I get into tooth, the longer I do this work. You know, I’m not tempted, like I was as a younger man, a younger clergy person, I’m not tempted to just see the individual or the personal. It’s all system and it’s radically wrapped together, as you have sort of articulated. As you have sort of articulated, and you know, I read a quote about you.
Bishop Wright: 25:45
Someone was describing you and said that your realism is never very far away from your idealism, and so, even when we’re thinking about it, we have to do the hard work of holding both ideas together, right. So there’s some stuff out there, there’s some data out there that boy could keep you up at night. But then you know, thank God, we have this thing called faith that, you know, keeps us in tension with hope and possibility. So, as we wrap up, give our average listener who’s not a senator and who’s not a bishop and who’s not, you know, a college professor what are two or three things that the average person can do that are steps in the right direction, or a book to read, or all of that.
Dr. David Orr: 26:29
Let me start with, I think, where we are. We’re facing two existential crises. One is climate change, and Los Angeles is just vivid testimony to the climate issues and suffering that is being imposed on people who are caught in the fire. But it could be rising sea levels, it could be drought, it could be war, it could be anything, but the world needs some positive thinking. The other crisis, and a related, I believe, it’s political how we do the public business.
Dr. David Orr: 27:02
So the one or two things I would recommend start with seeing politics as the place where we build our common response to the future. That’s where it all boils down and people say, well, I’m not political. Well, there’s no way to be not political. If you say I’m not political and stay out, you’re just supporting politics in the status quo. So get engaged and do it as not an individual, but do it in a group. Join groups that are involved in the politics of justice, fairness and sustainability, and they’re out there and they need your help. But begin to see our work ahead is fundamentally political. We’ll win or lose these battles on what we do collectively, and that’s additive. Collectively, you can start in a local precinct. You can start in a local neighborhood. It begins by building outward and building upward toward hope and faith, and you can’t guarantee success in any of this, but we do the work because it’s the right thing to do and who knows how this will play out over time? Guarantee success in any of this, but we do the work because it’s the right thing to do, and who knows how this will play out over time. But the one thing I would recommend to viewers is get engaged. Find a way to work on local issues or whatever you can local or larger issues, but we need your help.
Dr. David Orr: 28:17
And, rob, the thing I worry about is one of the things I do worry about is how fast lies can move in this age of social media. Somebody once put it that lies are gallop ahead while truth is still putting its boots on, and I think that that’s it’s a hard work. It’s easy to undo things. Once you’ve undone something through hate or carelessness or just indifference, it’s hard to restore anything to wholeness again. The last thing I would say is begin to see the we, we, ours and us. We’re collective in this and we’re related to everything that was and is and will be and that includes our great-great-grandchildren and also other species, and seeing that this web of life is something that’s sacred and holy and it’s in our hands.
Dr. David Orr: 29:06
The last thing I’d say, edmund Burke, the great conservative Irishman who was in the British Parliament. Burke described in his book the Revolution in France how we’re connected in a stream of obligation to a distant past that laid down certain things for us. We have an inheritance from a distant past and to also a distant future, and our job as trustees is to pass on this inheritance onto a future, an improved inheritance. There’s Lord knows there’s a lot of stuff to do to improve what we got. But I think this is not liberal, it’s not conservative, it’s simply common sense.
Bishop Wright: 29:52
And it is grounded in the great commandment, isn’t it? You know, to love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, mind, soul and strength, and your neighbor as yourself. What is cutting edge is ancient. All at the same time, dr David Orr, I want to say thank you to you for your courage, for your bright mind, for your persistence, and thank God for the hope that sustains you in telling us where we are but where we can go together.
