{"id":3467681,"date":"2017-07-28T10:17:39","date_gmt":"2017-07-28T10:17:39","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.resilience.org\/?p=3467681"},"modified":"2017-07-28T10:17:40","modified_gmt":"2017-07-28T10:17:40","slug":"dangerous-years-a-conversation-with-david-orr","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/stories\/2017-07-28\/dangerous-years-a-conversation-with-david-orr\/","title":{"rendered":"Dangerous Years: A Conversation with David Orr"},"content":{"rendered":"

Ed. note: This piece was originally published in the Realistic Living newsletter. More information about the work of Realistic Living can be found on their website<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr\u2019s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward<\/em>.\u00a0 I found, however, that a longer \u201cessay\u201d was what I felt called to write.\u00a0 Orr\u2019s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century.\u00a0 I am ranking this book, along with the Bible, as something to read over and over for the rest of my life.\u00a0 I recommend that you buy a hard copy, and wear it out over the next decade.\u00a0 The social content of this book is broad, deep, and on target, and Orr\u2019s prose reads like poetry.\u00a0 His choice of words is beautiful, gripping, and often funny.\u00a0 I am going to quote some examples for you to taste.<\/p>\n

First of all, he demolishes the lies of climate crisis denial, as well as the lies of minimalist response to this emergency:<\/p>\n

Nearly everything on Earth behaves or works differently at higher temperatures.\u00a0 Ecologies collapse,\u00a0 forests burn, metals expand, concrete runways buckle,\u00a0 rivers dry up, cooling towers fail, and people curse, kill, and terrorize more easily.\u00a0 Climate deniers . . . are doomed to roughly the same status as, say, members of the Flat Earth Society.\u00a0 page 25<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The solutions Orr develops begin with a shift in the human will or heart, then move on to a shift in the human mind, and end with real-world, down-and-dirty, power-politics, as well as the year-in-and-year-out local tasks of reconstruction.\u00a0 Here is a quote about the educational care of our social minds:<\/p>\n

We would be embarrassed to graduate students who could neither read nor count.\u00a0 We should be mortified, then, to graduate students who are ecologically illiterate\u2014clueless about the basics of ecology, energetics, systems dynamics\u2014the bedrock conditions for civilization and human life.\u00a0 page 110<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Orr prepares our awakening \u201chearts,\u201d \u201cwills,\u201d and \u201cminds\u201d for our real-world politics with sentences like these:<\/p>\n

And there will be no Deus ex machina,<\/em> or cavalry, or invisible hand, or miracle technological breakthrough that will rescue us in the nick of time.\u00a0 It will be up to us to change the odds and the outcomes on our own.\u00a0 page 144<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The next passage I will be reading aloud in my speeches.\u00a0 It is a gem that notices the spirit depth of our call to action:.<\/p>\n

If humanity is to have a better future it will be a more \u201cempathic civilization,\u201d one better balanced between our most competitive, hard-driving selves and our most harmonious, altruistic traits; one that embraces the yin-yang poles of behavior.\u00a0 It must be a change sufficiently global to bridge the chasms of ethnicity, gender, religion, nationality, and politics and deep enough to shift perceptions, behaviors, and values. The change must enable people to grow from a \u201chaving\u201d orientation to a \u201cbeing\u201d orientation to the world.\u00a0 It must deepen our appreciation, affiliation, and competence with the natural world, albeit a natural world undergoing accelerating changes.<\/p>\n

I do not think, however, that we can simply will ourselves to that empathic new world.\u00a0 The transition will result from social movements, activism, education, and political changes.\u00a0 But there is always an X-factor, an inexplicable process of metanoia, a word meaning \u201cpenitence; a reorientation of one\u2019s way of life; spiritual conversion.\u201d\u00a0 It is a change of inner sight.\u00a0 \u201cI once was blind, but now I see\u201d as the former slave trader John Newton wrote in the hymn \u201cAmazing Grace.\u201d\u00a0 Metanoia is liberation from bondage\u2014physical, mental, emotional\u2014a total change of perspective. pages 147-8<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I view the core of the revolution for a next Christianity to be the creation of metanoia<\/em> circles, small groupings of people in which our deepest humanness can be nurtured on a regular basis and our compassion and persistence prepared for our wide-world responsibilities.<\/p>\n

Orr pictures the role of politics as a \u201clong revolution.\u201d\u00a0 We now need more than small teams and edge movements: we need large structures of action that year-in-and-year-out for decades do all the little and big things that need to be done for this huge transition.<\/p>\n

Orr works through our core challenges with thorough analysis and inspiring description of practical options.\u00a0 He also continues to indicate the spirit courage and persistence it is going to take.\u00a0 He deals with sustainable democracy, ecological design, hotter cities, systemic thinking, a new agriculture, and much more.<\/p>\n

Orr concludes his book with a description of the Oberlin Project\u2014a multi-committee, local project of community-renewal organized by Orr and others, in Orr\u2019s Oberlin, Ohio home town.\u00a0 He\u00a0 pictures the kind of things that the co-pastors of future Christian Resurgence Circles might envision for their quality action in their local parishes of responsibility.\u00a0 Here is a quote taken from that final chapter:<\/p>\n

We need people who make charity and civility the norm.\u00a0 We need more parks, farmers\u2019 markets, bike trails, baseball teams, book groups, poetry readings, good coffee, conviviality, practical competence, and communities where the word \u201cneighbor\u201d is a verb, not a noun.\u00a0 We need people who know and love this place and see it whole and see it for what it can be. page 227<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Orr is also clear that we need people who lead the global level responses to the climate crisis, economic equity, democratization, campaign financing, racism, sexism, and more.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I started to write a brief review of David W. Orr\u2019s 2016 book Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward. I found, however, that a longer \u201cessay\u201d was what I felt called to write. Orr\u2019s book is the best thing I have read on the overall social-change challenges of this century. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":128238,"featured_media":3467687,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[213522,213523,79718,213530,79720],"tags":[163844,90747,102439,144770],"class_list":["post-3467681","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-inspiration","category-act-resources","category-environment","category-environment-featured","category-society","tag-buildingresilientsocieties","tag-climatechange","tag-climatechangecommunication","tag-climatechangeresponses"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3467681","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/128238"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3467681"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3467681\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3467687"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3467681"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3467681"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.resilience.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3467681"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}