Sustainability lecture at campus

Staff report

NEW WILMINGTON, Pa.

David Orr, an environmentalist, educator and author, will give a presentation at 7 p.m. Tuesday in Westminster College’s McKelvey Campus Center.

His lecture will touch on ecological sustainability and threats to future generations posed by current lifestyles.

Orr, a 1965 graduate of Westminster, is the author of “Hope Is an Imperative: The Essential David Orr” and “Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse.” He will sign copies of the books for those who purchase them after the lecture, which is free to the public.

A leader in sustainable economic development, Orr helped spearhead the Oberlin Project, a collaboration between Oberlin College and the town of Oberlin, aimed at revitalization; and the Lake Erie Crescent Initiative, a regional project involving industrial cities along the western Erie shore. Both initiatives have helped redirect investments to support more rapid deployment of renewable energy, a local foods economy and green building.

Orr is counselor to the president at Oberlin College and the Steven A. Minter fellow at the Cleveland Foundation. He is the author of seven books and co-editor of three others. He has authored more than 200 articles, reviews, book chapters and professional publications.

Orr has been awarded eight honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council and 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 30 years” by the U.S. Department of Energy.

For more information about the event, email watsonll@westminster.edu or call 724-946-6279.