David W. Orr is Counselor to the President at Oberlin College and a fellow at the Cleveland Foundation. He is founder and Chair of the Board of the Oberlin project and a founding editor of the journal Solutions. He was formerly Oberlin’s Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics.
Orr is also the author of seven books, including Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 200 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications.
In the past 25 years he has served as a board member or adviser to eight foundations and on the Boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Currently he is a Trustee of the Bioneers, Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and the Worldwatch Institute.
He has been awarded eight honorary degrees and a dozen other awards, including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, and recently a “Visionary Leadership Award” from Second Nature. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy.