No prosperous economy can be built on a planet in ruins. Period. While neither economics nor technology will save us, David Orr, the renowned environmental educator and activist, believes facing facts just might. His choice of tools for putting certifiably alarming facts to work surprises many: hope, a sense of humor, and systems thinking.

“There’s a tsunami approaching the shore where we're playing in the sand. We've got to equip people to see that, and understand that, and take precaution and precautionary measures before we're inundated with disaster.

“As serious as things are -- and they are serious -- I think we have to acquire a sense of humor which is to be able to step out of ourselves and see the human experiment in this human story,
“If you tell people that climate change is real, impoverishment is here, oceans are acidifying and all these kind of thing, you raise their anxiety level. The question is then what do they then do? You've got to redirect that energy in a positive way.

“Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up. You can't go to despair, that’s a sin. And ‘optimism’? You just don't know enough. Hope is the sweet spot. If you're hopeful, you have got to be active. You've got to be DOING stuff.”

Professor Orr presents the inescapable facts in Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse and employs his unconventional tools as a teacher and as the spearhead for the audacious “Oberlin Project” -- a planned green redesign of the entire Oberlin community. It’s now part of the Clinton Climate Initiative.

Having chosen education as his venue, systems thinking is especially important to Professor Orr.
“That's being able to work laterally across the curriculum and understand, ‘Gee-whiz! Ethics has something to do with ecology here. And economics has something to do with both of them. And so on. That's just seeing the pattern.”

This is the approach he took creating the now iconic building, the Adam Joseph Lewis Center at Oberlin College, where he is Distinguished Professor and Special Assistant to the President.

“(The Lewis Center) was a learning experience. Now we're going to do the whole downtown, starting with the 13-acre block that the whole college owns. Can you do a block that's powered entirely by sunlight, has zero discharge -- no waste product leaves it -- made out of local materials, and then can you use that as a driver to create a green economy?

“We want roughly ten years to do this project, hopefully sooner. And a thousand young people -- Oberlin students and high school kids and kids from votech schools -- along with this incredible team of designers we've assembled around the project. They'll learn how to roll up their sleeves and get down to work and solve problems, and do things in the world.”

Professor Orr’s realism permeates his worldview, including the leading role he insists the United States must play and he recognizes the leading role money plays.

“In the United States we spend about a trillion dollars a year on either military weapons and defense budget or war fighting. I don't think we have a snowball's chance in hell of getting anything like sustainability as long as we maintain a military presence of that size and scale. I'm not interested in making the military more efficient. I want to make a military smaller. Imagine if we cut the military budget in half, so you had $500 billion. That solves a lot of what can be solved.”