February 14, 2025 • 30 mins
Climate change is a real-world problem. Its intricate web connects governance, social justice, and ecological sustainability. Real solutions require moral leadership that reaches far beyond political party and country lines.
In the latest episode of our series on Moral Leadership, Bishop Wright has a conversation with Dr. David Orr, an esteemed environmental scholar, on his journey from international relations to pioneering environmental activism. They discuss the systemic issues surrounding climate change and the ethical responsibilities we all share in safeguarding our planet. Listen in for the full conversation.
Dr. David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus at Oberlin College. and presently Professor of Practice at Arizona State University. He 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 four others including Democracy Unchained (The New Press, 2020). He was a regular columnist for Conservation biology for twenty years.
He has also written over 250 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. He has served as a board member or adviser to eight foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and the Bioneers. Currently, he is a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado and Children and Nature Network. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, a “Visionary Leadership Award” from Second Nature, a National Leadership award from the U.S. Green Building Council, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the North American Association for Environmental Education, the 2018 Leadership Award from the American Renewable Energy Institute, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Green Energy Ohio.
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Transcript
Episode Transcript
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Dr. David Orr (00:00):
The hard part, I think, for our generation is to
realize that we cast a long andvery dark shadow on the future.
It is a moral issue like noother.
It's now global and it is nowlong-term.
Carbon stays in the atmospherefor thousands of years and we've
never faced an issue like that,where it's so stark.
But the same could be said ofmoral issues, those things that
(00:21):
we did way back, when the wordsthat we spoke, the effects
rippled out over time.
The past has never passed.
(01:08):
, michigan State .
Among a long list ofdistinctions at
Oberlin College and presentlyProfessor of Practice at Arizona
State
(02:47):
I think the long story short is an attempt to
find ways to connect the dots ina very confusing time.
How do we get the signal out ofall the noise, so to speak?
How do we find our way?
All the noise, so to speak?
How do we find our way?
(03:07):
It feels a little bit like thisculture'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 tolighten the way forward, and I
think there are lots of ways tosee that.
But in my case it's been ajourney and I think it's more of
(03:28):
a pilgrimage.
Bishop Wright (03:30):
Yeah, you're a person of faith and your PhD is
in international relations, andso how did we get to climate
work and environmental work frominternational relations?
Dr. David Orr (03:45):
Well, it's a good question and I don't think
there's an easy answer to that.
But it was reading a lot ofpeople.
It was hanging out with peoplewho were in the science
community.
I lived in Atlanta back in the70s.
I worked out of Jimmy Carter'soffice for a time on
environmental issues and then itwas a small, very small part of
his transition team before wewent into the White House.
And, rob, we knew enough inthose days to do a lot better on
(04:09):
climate and justice issues thanwe have done.
And President Carter came intothe campaign office in September
of 1976.
He was up in the polls by sevenor eight points.
He came over and we talked fora bit.
He asked for a paper on themost important environmental
issue his administration wouldface.
(04:30):
He was up over Gerald Ford atthat time by a fair margin.
The race later narrowed.
So I said, in effect, that'sbeyond my pay grade, but I'd be
happy to assemble people whoknow these things.
And so we did Cecil Phillips,who was the chairman of the
(04:51):
Georgia Conservancy at that time, and I assembled a group of
eight or nine people AmoryLovins and Herman Daly and
Eugene Odom from the Universityof Georgia, famous ecologists.
We drafted a paper the WolfCreek Statement that 50-some
years later still reads well50-some years later still reads
well.
We proposed a path forward byessentially putting in a tax on
fossil fuels at the port ofentry or mine mouth or the
(05:11):
wellhead that would graduallyrise over time, so people would
know that this is gonna be moreand more expensive to burn
fossil fuels and that tax thenwould be prorated and given back
to people according to incomeand poverty levels.
So it would be taking moneyfrom fossil fuel extraction and
importing and so forth andgiving that back to the poor
(05:34):
people.
So it essentially solved twoproblems.
One is a poverty problem that'sendemic in America and the
other is a burgeoning or growingclimate crisis.
But that of course didn'thappen.
But Carter made I think it wasgood an attempt to try to get
those things through in the fouryears he had.
But it's a long answer to agood question.
(05:56):
But I think the search here wastrying to connect the dots
between what we do, how we live,how we govern and our
responsibilities to each otherand to the future.
Bishop Wright (06:09):
That's a great segue for me at least, because,
you know, this January I've beenthinking a lot about Dr King
and I've been thinking aboutwhat moral leadership is, and so
broadly defined and notexclusive to Christians, but,
you know, an invitation to allpeople of all goodwill and all
good faith, this idea of moralleadership.
(06:29):
So how is this climate work,environmental work and
sustainability work?
How is that moral leadership orhow's that moral work?
I should start.
Dr. David Orr (06:39):
Dr King gave a commencement talk at Oberlin,
where I taught for 27 years, in1965.
It was a bit of a prelude to atalk he gave a year or two later
, talking about time, theurgency of time.
Time is not our friend.
There's such a thing, as hesaid, as being too late.
(07:00):
That raises an issue, and Ithink Dr King's life was such a
magnificent exhibition ofcourage.
And courage, aristotle told usa long time ago, is the
foundation for all the othervirtues.
You have to have a spinalcolumn, you have to stand up.
And King's leadership, and thatalso Robert Kennedy at that time
(07:24):
, there were some magnificentleaders that could have taken
this country in a very differentdirection, but it was a matter
and, as I understand King'swritings, he was moving in a
radical direction.
He saw the Vietnam War moreclearly than most anybody else
did at that time and he spokeout on it.
It didn't make him popular Tothe contrary, than most anybody
else did at that time and hespoke out on it.
It didn't make him popular Tothe contrary.
(07:49):
But what he was doing was tobegin to describe this pattern
that connects things and apattern of moral failure.
And so it's not a long step fromlooking at King's life and
record and words and seeing thepattern that connected climate
change with racism andcolonialism and extraction.
(08:10):
This was a pattern that began along time ago, I think.
To deal with climate change inany kind of coherent way, we
have to understand that we'rerelated to all that ever was or
is or will be.
We can't escape, we can'tsecede from the human race and
its origins or its destiny, andKing was pointing that out and
(08:32):
connecting economic travail herein the United States with the
suffering of Vietnamese peasantswho were fighting bombs and
imperialism and so forth andlots of difficulties that we
imposed on them, and that's theessence of the whole thing.
Climate change is simply theupshot.
So if you build an economybased on combustion of fossil
(08:56):
fuels and extraction ofmaterials and maximum economic
growth with minimum oversight,then the fires in LA this past
week become just a logicaloccurrence.
You build an economy onoppression, then you're going to
get lots of other things.
It's the rules of the game, inother words, and if the rules
(09:17):
emphasize growth at all costs,based on combustion and
inequality, then what you'regoing to get is kind of what we
see in the daily headlines.
Bishop Wright (09:48):
If you read King back to 1955, when he steps out
on the stage to lead theMontgomery 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 inMemphis, this radical
interrelatedness andconsciousness of
(10:08):
interrelatedness, you know, theother thing King says that comes
to mind as you speak is is thatchange does not run, you know,
does not run in on the wheels ofinevitability, right?
So?
So moral choices have to bemade for sustainability, and so
is that what it is, I mean,because this thing has been
politicized so much that it'sbeen pushed to the side by some,
(10:32):
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 ofthat?
Is that just sort of bigbusiness, pushing something that
is really urgent to the side sothey can keep on printing the
money and we can keep on livingat our own peril?
(10:53):
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, agarbage union, garbage workers
union strike.
That's right and that has akind of eerie quality to it
because we live in a throwawaysociety and we throw our trash
away and they would pick it up.
We throw people away and no onepicks it up, and so that was
kind of the symbolism of that Ithink is very striking.
(11:29):
On the moral leadership and soforth, this was the most
striking thing about King to mewas 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 careerstretching out before you and
all the things you're going todo in life and so forth.
He didn't do that.
He was aware.
(11:49):
I think what I read of hisbiography is he was aware that
his life would be short and yethe sacrificed it.
But as I trace and you know muchmore about his life than I do
but as I trace his life andwritings, there was a
progressive radicalization, andby radicalization I mean getting
to the root of the issue.
Part of the problem that wehave to reckon with is injustice
(12:12):
, and that injustice bubbles upin 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 andvery dark shadow on the future.
And it is a moral issue like noother.
(12:32):
It's now global and it is nowlong-term.
Carbon stays in the atmospherefor thousands of years, so 25%
of the carbon that we releasetoday on our various activities
and so forth will be in theatmosphere a thousand years from
now, and we've never faced anissue like that, so stark.
(12:53):
But the same could be said ofmoral issues.
So those things that we did wayback when, the words that we
spoke, the effects ripple outover time, and there's no
William Faulkner said this in apassage more poetic than I can
recall to say it, but that thepast has never passed.
The sins and the good thingsthat we did ripple forward in
(13:17):
time, but we're never free of it.
But in this case, rob, climatechange to me is a sum total of
all of our failures.
It's not just a biologicalthing, although it is that.
It's the sum total of whatwe've done on the planet.
I can't say that we weren'twarned.
The warnings go back.
The climate science began in the19th century, but a Swede by
(13:41):
the name of Savanti Arrheniusdid the basic calculations in
1897 that are still ballparkaccurate plus or minus 5 or 10
percent.
He got it right you burn somuch coal and oil and so forth,
you'll get such and such awarming.
Now, as a Swede, he thoughtthat was a good thing.
It would warm things up alittle bit, but now we know it's
trending to out of control.
(14:02):
And the scary thing somethingthat ought to scare everybody is
what happened beginning in 2023, when the warming took a sharp
jump upward for no known reasonand scientists are still trying
to figure that out and itcontinued into 2024.
So we have 2024 as the hottestyear on record, 2023 the second
(14:23):
hottest year on record, not by alittle bit, but by a great deal
, and so the effort tounderstand this scientifically
must move and this gets intoyour realm.
It must become the moralchallenge of our time.
It connects everything elsewe've done.
Climate change is aboutcolonialism.
It's about racism, it's aboutinequality.
(14:44):
It's about poverty.
It's about racism, it's aboutinequality, it's about poverty.
It's about war.
All of these things aredirectly and indirectly
connected to the combustion, theeconomy built around combustion
and exploitation.
Bishop Wright (14:56):
David, what do you say to people who may be
listening who agree with atleast one satirist I heard who
said that this kind ofconversation is the height of
arrogance?
Who are we to think that oursort of day-to-day living could
have an impact like you'redescribing or like you've
(15:17):
written about, on our, on ourworld?
You know this this world hashas gone through.
You know it's gone throughincredible upheaval, ice ages,
it's.
It's gone through, you know, anear obliteration of all species
, to have some species crawltheir way back into existence,
et cetera.
(15:37):
So you know, some are arguingthis is just the height of
arrogance.
That we think that you know thecars 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 therecord simply the scientific
record what we're doing to theEarth is happening.
It's happened before.
There have been worm spellsbefore, but not since we've been
on the planet.
So you go back 800,000 years ifyou use the ice core record.
If you use a little bitdifferent record and more
(16:13):
inferential data, you can goback several million years.
We're where we've never beenbefore.
The scary thing is it'shappening faster than it ever
happened before.
We're doing it in a matter ofdecades what took tens of
thousands of years Now.
The second thing, rob, is thisthere's a tendency in Western
(16:33):
culture and I think we got a lotof this from Thomas Jefferson
and other people to celebratethe individual, and that's good
to a point.
Now we're at an issue where wehave to balance pronouns I, me
and mine, with we, ours and us.
That's the difficulty, becausenow we're reckoning with
collective sin and we've thoughtfor so long that salvation was
(16:56):
simply a matter of theindividual being right with God
and Jesus and so forth, orbehaving in a certain way
individually.
But salvation was always anindividual thing.
We have to see it as acollective thing and our
behavior.
Yes, it does matter what youdrive, it does matter how you
vote, it does matter what youthrow away and what you keep.
(17:18):
Every matter, every instance ofkindness matters.
But it matters now not justindividually but collectively.
And that's hard to get usaround because you have to fight
through a lot of philosophicallayering and beliefs that are
all too convenient.
And, rob, part of the issue andI'm getting off on a tangent
(17:38):
here, but part of the issue iswe've been advertised at for so
long and the advertisingindustry, since Edward Bernays,
who was a nephew of SigmundFreud, learned how to tap into
our reptilian brainstem, we'resold things not by rationality
but by appeal to the sevendeadly sins.
Appeal to the seven deadly sins, and so we've been brainwashed
(18:02):
and we see, I'm told somethinglike 5,000,.
We're exposed to something like5,000 commercial messages every
day.
Now I don't know if that numberis correct, but let's say it's
half right 2,500 commercialmessages.
To take care of number one, wedo it all for you.
You deserve a break today,2,500,.
And so then we send our kids offto school or Sunday school and
a teacher will have them for anhour or two in a class, and that
(18:24):
can't undo that constantbombardment of advertising,
which is incredibly clever, andnow they're going to use AI to
sell us even more stuff.
So this is an attempt thelargest attempt ever to corrupt
the human mind and soul, andthat's a spiritual issue,
because the results occur in ourbehavior and show up in the
(18:45):
climate record, and so thesethings are linked in ways that
are, when you think about it,fairly obvious, but they're all
mostly insidious, and what youdo as the leader of the
Episcopal Church in Atlanta,georgia, in the nation, the
leader of the Episcopal Churchin Atlanta, georgia, in the
nation, contends with thistsunami of enticement to do
(19:09):
otherwise.
Bishop Wright (19:10):
That brings me to this question.
You know they say that theprophets, right, the biblical
prophets, those great Hebrewprophets it wasn't that they saw
around the corner, they didn'thave a crystal ball, but what
they did see is they saw intonow really deeply, and that's
what it sounds like you'retalking about.
Is that we look into now reallydeeply?
(19:32):
Then we have some way to thinkabout what's coming down the
pike, based on a deepunderstanding and interpretation
of now.
You wrote some time ago someyears ago I'm guessing that our
job is not to depress studentsbut to tell them the truth as
best we see it, right.
So how do you thread thatneedle?
(19:53):
Because you know, when youstart to really drill down into
the facts and figures, whatscience is saying about where we
are.
And you know, connecting toyour earlier comment about Dr
King, that we may be, in someregard, even past the moment to
change some things.
How do you not depress andinspire some hope and inspire
(20:16):
some positive, you knowbehaviors going forward, even
though you've got to tell themthe truth
Dr. David Orr (20:22):
I once wrote something that I uh it was part
of the pedagogy of, I think Iput it that hope is a verb with
the sleeves rolled up and theonly hopeful people legitimately
hopeful people I know arepeople actually doing things.
And last night I gave a talk,uh, to 100 or so folks here in
(20:44):
Oberlin.
And on one side there's JackNicholson in that scene from a
movie, a Few Great Men, and TomCruise has him on the stand.
It's a Hail Mary, legal passand he's got one chance to win
the case or he blows it and hegets Nicholson to say you can't
handle the truth.
On the other side of the screenI was doing this in PowerPoint
(21:05):
there's Winston Churchill whogoes on BBC in 1940, the bombs
falling on London, and he says Idon't have a thing to offer you
but blood, toil and tears andsweat.
Now I don't know what the rightcommunication strategy is, but
Mark Twain once said when indoubt, tell the truth, it will
amaze your friends and confoundyour enemies.
One of the things that we did atOberlin back in the 1990s and
(21:28):
2000s was to get these youngpeople involved in the design of
a solar-powered building, andso we had design charrettes.
So what kind of building do youwant to be educated in?
Well, they wanted sunlight.
Well, do you know where youlive?
This is Ohio.
Sunshine is a theory, so, butanyway, the building was built.
It became the first entirelysolar powered building on the US
(21:48):
college campus.
It's a zero discharge building.
We process all our wastewaterand it was educational all kinds
of ways.
But the students participatedwith the architects and
engineers that built thebuilding.
We're now coming up to the 25thyear of that project, so we put
together a AGALC Adam JosephLewis Center 2.0 project to
rebuild it.
(22:08):
Now, rob, your question gets tothe 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 workto do, and Lord knows there is
good work to do.
It's down the street, it's withyour neighbor, it's in your
city.
We're not suffering from lackof opportunity to do good work,
(22:28):
but I think engaging youngpeople in doing the good work
and doing it in John Lewis'ssense of necessary trouble, you
do the good work.
Martin Luther King was killedbecause he was I was in trouble
(22:49):
and he was up standing up forthe garbage workers in Memphis
and the poor and speaking outfor Vietnamese peasants and so
forth.
That was good work, but thatwas necessary work.
And I think, rather than givekids the idea you can have a fun
, exciting life and you can makea lot of money with a college
degree, I think they look forpurpose and in that purpose and
you don't guarantee them success.
That's not true, rob.
(23:11):
We held a meeting here.
We're doing something calledthe Oberlin Project and we had a
meeting.
It was a public meeting.
We had as background DanellaMeadows, who was a friend of
mine that died all too early inlife, but she'd written an essay
called Places to Intervene inthe System.
So, if you want to move asystem, where do you intervene?
And he had a list of 13,.
And you start up here at the topwith things you do to change
(23:33):
policy and you get down to thebottom, changing paradigms.
Well, you are about changingparadigms are about changing
paradigms the way you see theworld, not as an independent
thing where you're a voyeur, butas 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 wasto get the community to think
(23:55):
through.
Where do you intervene in thissystem called Oberlin, ohio,
small town of 9,000 people, agreat little college, an air
traffic control center?
So where do you intervene inthis system and the cause of
justice and righteousness andfairness and decency and beauty
and fun?
Because it ought to be acelebration, yeah, it shouldn't
be long-faced and all that.
(24:16):
So the idea was not to make thisor Danila Meadows' list of 13
scriptural.
You could argue it because shehad.
One of the things she had atthe top of the list was changing
the laws.
Well, the Voting Rights Act of1965 changed the laws, but it
also changed behavior andparadigm.
So it's not a clear definition.
It gets people thinking wheredo I put my energies to have
(24:40):
maximum effect?
good effect and part of itcould be at any scale.
You could be growing gardens,community gardens, and feeding
people.
You could be in Congress andtrying to fight for legislation
and decency and so forth.
You could be in the church andbegin to do what the root word
for religion, I think, means tobind together, and the word
(25:02):
whole is close to holiness andhealth, and so these things are
combined, and so I see thechurch and your work so
brilliantly in this, attemptingto bring this wholeness together
.
This is where all theconnections go.
Bishop Wright (25:16):
It has to.
And I think that the longer Iget into tooth, the longer I do
this work.
You know, I'm not tempted, likeI was as a younger man, a
younger clergy person, I'm nottempted to just see the
individual or the personal.
It's all system and it'sradically wrapped together, as
(25:37):
you have sort of articulated.
As you have sort of articulated, and you know, I read a quote
about you.
Someone was describing you andsaid that your realism is never
very far away from your idealism, and so, even when we're
thinking about it, we have to dothe 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 atnight.
(25:59):
But then you know, thank God,we have this thing called faith
that, you know, keeps us intension with hope and
possibility.
So, as we wrap up, give ouraverage listener who's not a
senator and who's not a bishopand who's not, you know, a
college professor what are twoor three things that the average
(26:22):
person can do that are steps inthe 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 existentialcrises.
One is climate change, and LosAngeles is just vivid testimony
to the climate issues andsuffering that is being imposed
on people who are caught in thefire.
But it could be rising sealevels, it could be drought, it
(26:50):
could be war, it could beanything, but the world needs
some positive thinking.
The other crisis, and a related, I believe, it's political how
we do the public business.
So the one or two things I wouldrecommend start with seeing
politics as the place where webuild our common response to the
(27:12):
future.
That's where it all boils downand people say, well, I'm not
political.
Well, there's no way to be notpolitical.
If you say I'm not politicaland stay out, you're just
supporting politics in thestatus quo.
So get engaged and do it as notan individual, but do it in a
group.
Join groups that are involvedin the politics of justice,
fairness and sustainability, andthey're out there and they need
(27:35):
your help.
But begin to see our work aheadis fundamentally political.
We'll win or lose these battleson what we do collectively, and
that's additive.
Collectively, you can start ina local precinct.
You can start in a localneighborhood.
It begins by building outwardand building upward toward hope
(27:56):
and faith, and you can'tguarantee success in any of this
, but we do the work becauseit's the right thing to do and
who knows how this will play outover time?
Guarantee success in any ofthis, but we do the work because
it's the right thing to do, andwho knows how this will play
out over time.
But the one thing I wouldrecommend to viewers is get
engaged.
Find a way to work on localissues or whatever you can local
or larger issues, but we needyour help.
(28:17):
And, rob, the thing I worryabout is one of the things I do
worry about is how fast lies canmove in this age of social
media.
Somebody once put it that liesare gallop ahead while truth is
still putting its boots on, andI think that that's it's a hard
work.
It's easy to undo things.
Once you've undone somethingthrough hate or carelessness or
(28:40):
just indifference, it's hard torestore anything to wholeness
again.
The last thing I would say isbegin to see the we, we, ours
and us.
We're collective in this andwe're related to everything that
was and is and will be and thatincludes our
great-great-grandchildren andalso other species, and seeing
that this web of life issomething that's sacred and holy
(29:01):
and it's in our hands.
The last thing I'd say, edmundBurke, the great conservative
Irishman who was in the BritishParliament.
Burke described in his book theRevolution in France how we're
connected in a stream ofobligation to a distant past
(29:25):
that laid down certain thingsfor us.
We have an inheritance from adistant past and to also a
distant future, and our job astrustees is to pass on this
inheritance onto a future, animproved inheritance.
There's Lord knows there's alot of stuff to do to improve
what we got.
But I think this is not liberal, it's not conservative, it's
(29:50):
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, andyour neighbor as yourself.
What is cutting edge is ancient.
All at the same time, dr DavidOrr, I want to say thank you to
you for your courage, for yourbright mind, for your
persistence, and thank God forthe hope that sustains you in
(30:17):
telling us where we are butwhere we can go together.
The hard part, I think, for our generation is to
realize that we cast a long andvery dark shadow on the future.
It is a moral issue like noother.
It's now global and it is nowlong-term.
Carbon stays in the atmospherefor thousands of years and we've
never faced an issue like that,where it's so stark.
But the same could be said ofmoral issues, those things that
(00:21):
we did way back, when the wordsthat we spoke, the effects
rippled out over time.
The past has never passed.
(01:08):
, michigan State .
Among a long list ofdistinctions at
Oberlin College and presentlyProfessor of Practice at Arizona
State
(02:47):
I think the long story short is an attempt to
find ways to connect the dots ina very confusing time.
How do we get the signal out ofall the noise, so to speak?
How do we find our way?
All the noise, so to speak?
How do we find our way?
(03:07):
It feels a little bit like thisculture'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 tolighten the way forward, and I
think there are lots of ways tosee that.
But in my case it's been ajourney and I think it's more of
(03:28):
a pilgrimage.
Bishop Wright (03:30):
Yeah, you're a person of faith and your PhD is
in international relations, andso how did we get to climate
work and environmental work frominternational relations?
Dr. David Orr (03:45):
Well, it's a good question and I don't think
there's an easy answer to that.
But it was reading a lot ofpeople.
It was hanging out with peoplewho were in the science
community.
I lived in Atlanta back in the70s.
I worked out of Jimmy Carter'soffice for a time on
environmental issues and then itwas a small, very small part of
his transition team before wewent into the White House.
And, rob, we knew enough inthose days to do a lot better on
(04:09):
climate and justice issues thanwe have done.
And President Carter came intothe campaign office in September
of 1976.
He was up in the polls by sevenor eight points.
He came over and we talked fora bit.
He asked for a paper on themost important environmental
issue his administration wouldface.
(04:30):
He was up over Gerald Ford atthat time by a fair margin.
The race later narrowed.
So I said, in effect, that'sbeyond my pay grade, but I'd be
happy to assemble people whoknow these things.
And so we did Cecil Phillips,who was the chairman of the
(04:51):
Georgia Conservancy at that time, and I assembled a group of
eight or nine people AmoryLovins and Herman Daly and
Eugene Odom from the Universityof Georgia, famous ecologists.
We drafted a paper the WolfCreek Statement that 50-some
years later still reads well50-some years later still reads
well.
We proposed a path forward byessentially putting in a tax on
fossil fuels at the port ofentry or mine mouth or the
(05:11):
wellhead that would graduallyrise over time, so people would
know that this is gonna be moreand more expensive to burn
fossil fuels and that tax thenwould be prorated and given back
to people according to incomeand poverty levels.
So it would be taking moneyfrom fossil fuel extraction and
importing and so forth andgiving that back to the poor
(05:34):
people.
So it essentially solved twoproblems.
One is a poverty problem that'sendemic in America and the
other is a burgeoning or growingclimate crisis.
But that of course didn'thappen.
But Carter made I think it wasgood an attempt to try to get
those things through in the fouryears he had.
But it's a long answer to agood question.
(05:56):
But I think the search here wastrying to connect the dots
between what we do, how we live,how we govern and our
responsibilities to each otherand to the future.
Bishop Wright (06:09):
That's a great segue for me at least, because,
you know, this January I've beenthinking a lot about Dr King
and I've been thinking aboutwhat moral leadership is, and so
broadly defined and notexclusive to Christians, but,
you know, an invitation to allpeople of all goodwill and all
good faith, this idea of moralleadership.
(06:29):
So how is this climate work,environmental work and
sustainability work?
How is that moral leadership orhow's that moral work?
I should start.
Dr. David Orr (06:39):
Dr King gave a commencement talk at Oberlin,
where I taught for 27 years, in1965.
It was a bit of a prelude to atalk he gave a year or two later
, talking about time, theurgency of time.
Time is not our friend.
There's such a thing, as hesaid, as being too late.
(07:00):
That raises an issue, and Ithink Dr King's life was such a
magnificent exhibition ofcourage.
And courage, aristotle told usa long time ago, is the
foundation for all the othervirtues.
You have to have a spinalcolumn, you have to stand up.
And King's leadership, and thatalso Robert Kennedy at that time
(07:24):
, there were some magnificentleaders that could have taken
this country in a very differentdirection, but it was a matter
and, as I understand King'swritings, he was moving in a
radical direction.
He saw the Vietnam War moreclearly than most anybody else
did at that time and he spokeout on it.
It didn't make him popular Tothe contrary, than most anybody
else did at that time and hespoke out on it.
It didn't make him popular Tothe contrary.
(07:49):
But what he was doing was tobegin to describe this pattern
that connects things and apattern of moral failure.
And so it's not a long step fromlooking at King's life and
record and words and seeing thepattern that connected climate
change with racism andcolonialism and extraction.
(08:10):
This was a pattern that began along time ago, I think.
To deal with climate change inany kind of coherent way, we
have to understand that we'rerelated to all that ever was or
is or will be.
We can't escape, we can'tsecede from the human race and
its origins or its destiny, andKing was pointing that out and
(08:32):
connecting economic travail herein the United States with the
suffering of Vietnamese peasantswho were fighting bombs and
imperialism and so forth andlots of difficulties that we
imposed on them, and that's theessence of the whole thing.
Climate change is simply theupshot.
So if you build an economybased on combustion of fossil
(08:56):
fuels and extraction ofmaterials and maximum economic
growth with minimum oversight,then the fires in LA this past
week become just a logicaloccurrence.
You build an economy onoppression, then you're going to
get lots of other things.
It's the rules of the game, inother words, and if the rules
(09:17):
emphasize growth at all costs,based on combustion and
inequality, then what you'regoing to get is kind of what we
see in the daily headlines.
Bishop Wright (09:48):
If you read King back to 1955, when he steps out
on the stage to lead theMontgomery 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 inMemphis, this radical
interrelatedness andconsciousness of
(10:08):
interrelatedness, you know, theother thing King says that comes
to mind as you speak is is thatchange does not run, you know,
does not run in on the wheels ofinevitability, right?
So?
So moral choices have to bemade for sustainability, and so
is that what it is, I mean,because this thing has been
politicized so much that it'sbeen pushed to the side by some,
(10:32):
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 ofthat?
Is that just sort of bigbusiness, pushing something that
is really urgent to the side sothey can keep on printing the
money and we can keep on livingat our own peril?
(10:53):
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, agarbage union, garbage workers
union strike.
That's right and that has akind of eerie quality to it
because we live in a throwawaysociety and we throw our trash
away and they would pick it up.
We throw people away and no onepicks it up, and so that was
kind of the symbolism of that Ithink is very striking.
(11:29):
On the moral leadership and soforth, this was the most
striking thing about King to mewas 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 careerstretching out before you and
all the things you're going todo in life and so forth.
He didn't do that.
He was aware.
(11:49):
I think what I read of hisbiography is he was aware that
his life would be short and yethe sacrificed it.
But as I trace and you know muchmore about his life than I do
but as I trace his life andwritings, there was a
progressive radicalization, andby radicalization I mean getting
to the root of the issue.
Part of the problem that wehave to reckon with is injustice
(12:12):
, and that injustice bubbles upin 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 andvery dark shadow on the future.
And it is a moral issue like noother.
(12:32):
It's now global and it is nowlong-term.
Carbon stays in the atmospherefor thousands of years, so 25%
of the carbon that we releasetoday on our various activities
and so forth will be in theatmosphere a thousand years from
now, and we've never faced anissue like that, so stark.
(12:53):
But the same could be said ofmoral issues.
So those things that we did wayback when, the words that we
spoke, the effects ripple outover time, and there's no
William Faulkner said this in apassage more poetic than I can
recall to say it, but that thepast has never passed.
The sins and the good thingsthat we did ripple forward in
(13:17):
time, but we're never free of it.
But in this case, rob, climatechange to me is a sum total of
all of our failures.
It's not just a biologicalthing, although it is that.
It's the sum total of whatwe've done on the planet.
I can't say that we weren'twarned.
The warnings go back.
The climate science began in the19th century, but a Swede by
(13:41):
the name of Savanti Arrheniusdid the basic calculations in
1897 that are still ballparkaccurate plus or minus 5 or 10
percent.
He got it right you burn somuch coal and oil and so forth,
you'll get such and such awarming.
Now, as a Swede, he thoughtthat was a good thing.
It would warm things up alittle bit, but now we know it's
trending to out of control.
(14:02):
And the scary thing somethingthat ought to scare everybody is
what happened beginning in 2023, when the warming took a sharp
jump upward for no known reasonand scientists are still trying
to figure that out and itcontinued into 2024.
So we have 2024 as the hottestyear on record, 2023 the second
(14:23):
hottest year on record, not by alittle bit, but by a great deal
, and so the effort tounderstand this scientifically
must move and this gets intoyour realm.
It must become the moralchallenge of our time.
It connects everything elsewe've done.
Climate change is aboutcolonialism.
It's about racism, it's aboutinequality.
(14:44):
It's about poverty.
It's about racism, it's aboutinequality, it's about poverty.
It's about war.
All of these things aredirectly and indirectly
connected to the combustion, theeconomy built around combustion
and exploitation.
Bishop Wright (14:56):
David, what do you say to people who may be
listening who agree with atleast one satirist I heard who
said that this kind ofconversation is the height of
arrogance?
Who are we to think that oursort of day-to-day living could
have an impact like you'redescribing or like you've
(15:17):
written about, on our, on ourworld?
You know this this world hashas gone through.
You know it's gone throughincredible upheaval, ice ages,
it's.
It's gone through, you know, anear obliteration of all species
, to have some species crawltheir way back into existence,
et cetera.
(15:37):
So you know, some are arguingthis is just the height of
arrogance.
That we think that you know thecars 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 therecord simply the scientific
record what we're doing to theEarth is happening.
It's happened before.
There have been worm spellsbefore, but not since we've been
on the planet.
So you go back 800,000 years ifyou use the ice core record.
If you use a little bitdifferent record and more
(16:13):
inferential data, you can goback several million years.
We're where we've never beenbefore.
The scary thing is it'shappening faster than it ever
happened before.
We're doing it in a matter ofdecades what took tens of
thousands of years Now.
The second thing, rob, is thisthere's a tendency in Western
(16:33):
culture and I think we got a lotof this from Thomas Jefferson
and other people to celebratethe individual, and that's good
to a point.
Now we're at an issue where wehave to balance pronouns I, me
and mine, with we, ours and us.
That's the difficulty, becausenow we're reckoning with
collective sin and we've thoughtfor so long that salvation was
(16:56):
simply a matter of theindividual being right with God
and Jesus and so forth, orbehaving in a certain way
individually.
But salvation was always anindividual thing.
We have to see it as acollective thing and our
behavior.
Yes, it does matter what youdrive, it does matter how you
vote, it does matter what youthrow away and what you keep.
(17:18):
Every matter, every instance ofkindness matters.
But it matters now not justindividually but collectively.
And that's hard to get usaround because you have to fight
through a lot of philosophicallayering and beliefs that are
all too convenient.
And, rob, part of the issue andI'm getting off on a tangent
(17:38):
here, but part of the issue iswe've been advertised at for so
long and the advertisingindustry, since Edward Bernays,
who was a nephew of SigmundFreud, learned how to tap into
our reptilian brainstem, we'resold things not by rationality
but by appeal to the sevendeadly sins.
Appeal to the seven deadly sins, and so we've been brainwashed
(18:02):
and we see, I'm told somethinglike 5,000,.
We're exposed to something like5,000 commercial messages every
day.
Now I don't know if that numberis correct, but let's say it's
half right 2,500 commercialmessages.
To take care of number one, wedo it all for you.
You deserve a break today,2,500,.
And so then we send our kids offto school or Sunday school and
a teacher will have them for anhour or two in a class, and that
(18:24):
can't undo that constantbombardment of advertising,
which is incredibly clever, andnow they're going to use AI to
sell us even more stuff.
So this is an attempt thelargest attempt ever to corrupt
the human mind and soul, andthat's a spiritual issue,
because the results occur in ourbehavior and show up in the
(18:45):
climate record, and so thesethings are linked in ways that
are, when you think about it,fairly obvious, but they're all
mostly insidious, and what youdo as the leader of the
Episcopal Church in Atlanta,georgia, in the nation, the
leader of the Episcopal Churchin Atlanta, georgia, in the
nation, contends with thistsunami of enticement to do
(19:09):
otherwise.
Bishop Wright (19:10):
That brings me to this question.
You know they say that theprophets, right, the biblical
prophets, those great Hebrewprophets it wasn't that they saw
around the corner, they didn'thave a crystal ball, but what
they did see is they saw intonow really deeply, and that's
what it sounds like you'retalking about.
Is that we look into now reallydeeply?
(19:32):
Then we have some way to thinkabout what's coming down the
pike, based on a deepunderstanding and interpretation
of now.
You wrote some time ago someyears ago I'm guessing that our
job is not to depress studentsbut to tell them the truth as
best we see it, right.
So how do you thread thatneedle?
(19:53):
Because you know, when youstart to really drill down into
the facts and figures, whatscience is saying about where we
are.
And you know, connecting toyour earlier comment about Dr
King, that we may be, in someregard, even past the moment to
change some things.
How do you not depress andinspire some hope and inspire
(20:16):
some positive, you knowbehaviors going forward, even
though you've got to tell themthe truth
Dr. David Orr (20:22):
I once wrote something that I uh it was part
of the pedagogy of, I think Iput it that hope is a verb with
the sleeves rolled up and theonly hopeful people legitimately
hopeful people I know arepeople actually doing things.
And last night I gave a talk,uh, to 100 or so folks here in
(20:44):
Oberlin.
And on one side there's JackNicholson in that scene from a
movie, a Few Great Men, and TomCruise has him on the stand.
It's a Hail Mary, legal passand he's got one chance to win
the case or he blows it and hegets Nicholson to say you can't
handle the truth.
On the other side of the screenI was doing this in PowerPoint
(21:05):
there's Winston Churchill whogoes on BBC in 1940, the bombs
falling on London, and he says Idon't have a thing to offer you
but blood, toil and tears andsweat.
Now I don't know what the rightcommunication strategy is, but
Mark Twain once said when indoubt, tell the truth, it will
amaze your friends and confoundyour enemies.
One of the things that we did atOberlin back in the 1990s and
(21:28):
2000s was to get these youngpeople involved in the design of
a solar-powered building, andso we had design charrettes.
So what kind of building do youwant to be educated in?
Well, they wanted sunlight.
Well, do you know where youlive?
This is Ohio.
Sunshine is a theory, so, butanyway, the building was built.
It became the first entirelysolar powered building on the US
(21:48):
college campus.
It's a zero discharge building.
We process all our wastewaterand it was educational all kinds
of ways.
But the students participatedwith the architects and
engineers that built thebuilding.
We're now coming up to the 25thyear of that project, so we put
together a AGALC Adam JosephLewis Center 2.0 project to
rebuild it.
(22:08):
Now, rob, your question gets tothe 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 workto do, and Lord knows there is
good work to do.
It's down the street, it's withyour neighbor, it's in your
city.
We're not suffering from lackof opportunity to do good work,
(22:28):
but I think engaging youngpeople in doing the good work
and doing it in John Lewis'ssense of necessary trouble, you
do the good work.
Martin Luther King was killedbecause he was I was in trouble
(22:49):
and he was up standing up forthe garbage workers in Memphis
and the poor and speaking outfor Vietnamese peasants and so
forth.
That was good work, but thatwas necessary work.
And I think, rather than givekids the idea you can have a fun
, exciting life and you can makea lot of money with a college
degree, I think they look forpurpose and in that purpose and
you don't guarantee them success.
That's not true, rob.
(23:11):
We held a meeting here.
We're doing something calledthe Oberlin Project and we had a
meeting.
It was a public meeting.
We had as background DanellaMeadows, who was a friend of
mine that died all too early inlife, but she'd written an essay
called Places to Intervene inthe System.
So, if you want to move asystem, where do you intervene?
And he had a list of 13,.
And you start up here at the topwith things you do to change
(23:33):
policy and you get down to thebottom, changing paradigms.
Well, you are about changingparadigms are about changing
paradigms the way you see theworld, not as an independent
thing where you're a voyeur, butas 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 wasto get the community to think
(23:55):
through.
Where do you intervene in thissystem called Oberlin, ohio,
small town of 9,000 people, agreat little college, an air
traffic control center?
So where do you intervene inthis system and the cause of
justice and righteousness andfairness and decency and beauty
and fun?
Because it ought to be acelebration, yeah, it shouldn't
be long-faced and all that.
(24:16):
So the idea was not to make thisor Danila Meadows' list of 13
scriptural.
You could argue it because shehad.
One of the things she had atthe top of the list was changing
the laws.
Well, the Voting Rights Act of1965 changed the laws, but it
also changed behavior andparadigm.
So it's not a clear definition.
It gets people thinking wheredo I put my energies to have
(24:40):
maximum effect?
good effect and part of itcould be at any scale.
You could be growing gardens,community gardens, and feeding
people.
You could be in Congress andtrying to fight for legislation
and decency and so forth.
You could be in the church andbegin to do what the root word
for religion, I think, means tobind together, and the word
(25:02):
whole is close to holiness andhealth, and so these things are
combined, and so I see thechurch and your work so
brilliantly in this, attemptingto bring this wholeness together
.
This is where all theconnections go.
Bishop Wright (25:16):
It has to.
And I think that the longer Iget into tooth, the longer I do
this work.
You know, I'm not tempted, likeI was as a younger man, a
younger clergy person, I'm nottempted to just see the
individual or the personal.
It's all system and it'sradically wrapped together, as
(25:37):
you have sort of articulated.
As you have sort of articulated, and you know, I read a quote
about you.
Someone was describing you andsaid that your realism is never
very far away from your idealism, and so, even when we're
thinking about it, we have to dothe 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 atnight.
(25:59):
But then you know, thank God,we have this thing called faith
that, you know, keeps us intension with hope and
possibility.
So, as we wrap up, give ouraverage listener who's not a
senator and who's not a bishopand who's not, you know, a
college professor what are twoor three things that the average
(26:22):
person can do that are steps inthe 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 existentialcrises.
One is climate change, and LosAngeles is just vivid testimony
to the climate issues andsuffering that is being imposed
on people who are caught in thefire.
But it could be rising sealevels, it could be drought, it
(26:50):
could be war, it could beanything, but the world needs
some positive thinking.
The other crisis, and a related, I believe, it's political how
we do the public business.
So the one or two things I wouldrecommend start with seeing
politics as the place where webuild our common response to the
(27:12):
future.
That's where it all boils downand people say, well, I'm not
political.
Well, there's no way to be notpolitical.
If you say I'm not politicaland stay out, you're just
supporting politics in thestatus quo.
So get engaged and do it as notan individual, but do it in a
group.
Join groups that are involvedin the politics of justice,
fairness and sustainability, andthey're out there and they need
(27:35):
your help.
But begin to see our work aheadis fundamentally political.
We'll win or lose these battleson what we do collectively, and
that's additive.
Collectively, you can start ina local precinct.
You can start in a localneighborhood.
It begins by building outwardand building upward toward hope
(27:56):
and faith, and you can'tguarantee success in any of this
, but we do the work becauseit's the right thing to do and
who knows how this will play outover time?
Guarantee success in any ofthis, but we do the work because
it's the right thing to do, andwho knows how this will play
out over time.
But the one thing I wouldrecommend to viewers is get
engaged.
Find a way to work on localissues or whatever you can local
or larger issues, but we needyour help.
(28:17):
And, rob, the thing I worryabout is one of the things I do
worry about is how fast lies canmove in this age of social
media.
Somebody once put it that liesare gallop ahead while truth is
still putting its boots on, andI think that that's it's a hard
work.
It's easy to undo things.
Once you've undone somethingthrough hate or carelessness or
(28:40):
just indifference, it's hard torestore anything to wholeness
again.
The last thing I would say isbegin to see the we, we, ours
and us.
We're collective in this andwe're related to everything that
was and is and will be and thatincludes our
great-great-grandchildren andalso other species, and seeing
that this web of life issomething that's sacred and holy
(29:01):
and it's in our hands.
The last thing I'd say, edmundBurke, the great conservative
Irishman who was in the BritishParliament.
Burke described in his book theRevolution in France how we're
connected in a stream ofobligation to a distant past
(29:25):
that laid down certain thingsfor us.
We have an inheritance from adistant past and to also a
distant future, and our job astrustees is to pass on this
inheritance onto a future, animproved inheritance.
There's Lord knows there's alot of stuff to do to improve
what we got.
But I think this is not liberal, it's not conservative, it's
(29:50):
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, andyour neighbor as yourself.
What is cutting edge is ancient.
All at the same time, dr DavidOrr, I want to say thank you to
you for your courage, for yourbright mind, for your
persistence, and thank God forthe hope that sustains you in
(30:17):
telling us where we are butwhere we can go together.
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