Thursday, April 7, 2011

David W. Orr


Thanks to Denis Quaintance form Quaintance Weaver Restaurants and Hotels, David Orr was able to come to the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and speak to the academic community about sustainability. He gave a rather compelling speech on how humans have an natural fight or flight response to unexpected events; however, for some reason when thousands and billions of decimals are added to the equation we are no longer interested in responding to that potentially harmful fact. He gave examples of: the rector nine event and forty to fifty-foot tsunami in Japan; the I-35 bridge leaving Manhattan; and the atmospheric carbon dioxide measured at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Orr used rather creative speech methods to “wake-up” the crowd and make them think! He put great emphasis on how it is the responsibility of individuals of our generation to make the changes that will impact our world thousands of years form now. Orr also stressed that if nature made every critical system to have two parts (ie. Kidneys, lungs…) then why shouldn’t the systems we as humans put in place also have two systems?

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