NEWS

World-renowned environmental education, design expert to give Sept. 24 speech

CHAPEL HILL -- Dr. David Orr, one of the world’s leading experts on environmental education and environmentally friendly design and construction, will give a lecture 7 p.m. Sept. 24 that focuses on Oberlin College’s "green building" experience and its Climate Neutral by 2020 policy.

The free lecture is co-sponsored by the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s Carolina Environmental Program and its Sustainability Coalition, and will be held in the Tate-Turner-Kuralt Building auditorium. Refreshments will follow the program, in the Tate-Turner-Kuralt Building’s fifth-floor lounge.

Orr will give a more technical lecture on lessons learned while designing and constructing green buildings at 9 a.m. Sept. 25 in Toy Lounge, located on the fourth floor of Dey Hall.

Orr is best known for his pioneering work on environmental literacy in higher education and his recent work in ecological design. He raised funds for, and led the effort to design and build, the $7.4-million Adam J. Lewis Center for Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, a building described by The New York Times as the most remarkable of a new generation of college and university buildings.

Orr serves as professor and chairman of Oberlin’s Environmental Studies Program. He is a contributing editor of Conservation Biology, a trustee of the Compton Foundation and the Educational Foundation of America and a member of the Advisory Committee for the Luce Foundation Environmental Program.

His more than 110 publications include three books: "The Nature of Design," "Earth in Mind" and "Ecological Literacy." Among Orr’s honors are the National Wildlife Federation’s National Conservation Achievement Award and the Lyndhurst Foundation’s Lyndhurst Prize.

"The environmental crisis originates with the inability to think about ecological patterns, systems of causation, and the long-term effects of human actions. … In contrast, what can be called ecological design intelligence is the capacity to understand the ecological context in which humans live, to recognize limits, and to get the scale of things right," Orr wrote in "Earth in Mind."

The UNC Sustainability Coalition was formed in response to an executive order from then-Gov. Jim Hunt, as well as a student proposal calling for implementation of "green" practices on campus. Such practices are in accordance with the campus’s master plan, whose environmental strategy establishes campuswide recommendations for keeping UNC’s natural systems healthy and reducing the university’s environmental impact on the larger community.

The coalition includes task groups on academics, business operations, energy, land and buildings, material resources and waste reduction, outreach, transportation and water resources.

The Carolina Environmental Program is a multidisciplinary initiative of UNC dedicated to addressing factors that build an environmentally sustainable society. CEP offers majors in environmental science and environmental studies within the College of Arts and Sciences. The program also fosters collaborative research on large-scale environmental problems and provides technical assistance, training and up-to-date information on environmental issues to North Carolina communities.

The CEP administers a network of field sites in partnership with the College of Arts and Sciences Study Abroad Office, including locations in Bangkok, Thailand; Salzburg, Austria; Highlands, N.C.; and Manteo, N.C.

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Note: Orr is available for interviews; to request an interview or photo of Orr, contact Tony Reevy at (919) 966-9927 or tony_reevy@unc.edu.

Carolina Environmental Program contact: Tony Reevy at (919) 966-9927 or tony_reevy@unc.edu

UNC Sustainability Coalition contact: Cindy Pollock Shea at (919) 843-5251 or cpshea@fac.unc.edu