June 27 – July 2, 2011
David W. Orr, Stephan Mayer & Rob Hopkins
This course is open for bookings.
Human history has entered “the long emergency” driven by climate destabilisation, the end of cheap fossil fuels, economic uncertainty, inequality, and increasing political turmoil.
Responses to the long emergency will depend on varying situations and circumstances, different blends of culture and ecology, and local capacities for creativity and adaptability. But this course will focus on what communities can and are doing to create maximum resilience and sustainability in a time of rapid change and instability. This is a chance to really explore the road ahead with those leading on pioneering collaborations as influence and inspiration for your own responses to the long emergency.
We will begin by looking at the larger theoretical issues of psychology, philosophy, economics, and politics. But the majority of our time will focus on issues of food, energy, shelter, water, and economy at a scale commensurate with neighborhood, community-wide, and regional action and how these might be linked into effective networks at regional, national, and global scales.
In short we begin with the forces driving change and the failure of societies virtually everywhere to do what future generations will regard as merely obvious, and end with possible paths aimed at reconciling the differences between human and environmental systems.
The course material will be discussed in the context of real life initiatives such as The Oberlin Project (a collaborative venture involving Oberlin College, the City of Oberlin, Oberlin City Schools and private sector organizations to build a prosperous post-fossil fuel based economy) and Transition Town Totnes (Rob Hopkins will join the course for this session).
…More than 10 years ago, Orr, the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College, spearheaded an effort to build The Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which remains one of the most innovative green buildings ever to be built. (The building met the requirements of the Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED)-Platinum standard before the LEED system was developed.)
Today Orr is working on The Oberlin Project, an ambitious vision to turn a 13-acre piece of land the college owns in downtown Oberlin, Ohio into a LEED-Platinum neighborhood. One of 18 projects selected by the Clinton Climate Initiative as a climate positive project, the site would serve as an arts district and regional economic and educational catalyst that would include a 20,000-acre working “greenbelt.”… Read the full article in Magazine Sustainable Industries or to listen to an audio version at http://sustainableindustries.com/podcasts/sustainable-industries-interviews-david-orr
David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Europe and has served as a Trustee for many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. His career as a scholar, teacher, writer, speaker, and entrepreneur spans fields as diverse as environment and politics, environmental education, campus greening, green building, ecological design, and climate change. He is the author of six books including Ecological Literacy and Earth in Mind.
In 1987 he organized studies of energy, water, and materials use on several college campuses that helped to launch the green campus movement. In 1996 he organized the effort to design the first substantially green building on a U.S. college campus. The Adam Joseph Lewis Center was later named by the U.S. Department of Energy as “One of Thirty Milestone Buildings in the 20th Century,” and by The New York Times as the most interesting of a new generation of college and university buildings.
The Lewis Center purifies all of its wastewater and is the first college building in the U.S. powered entirely by sunlight. But most important it became a laboratory in sustainability that is training some of the nation’s brightest and most dedicated students for careers in solving environmental problems.
In an influential article in the Chronicle of Higher Education 2000 Orr proposed the goal of carbon neutrality for colleges and universities and subsequently organized and funded an effort to define a carbon neutral plan for his own campus at Oberlin. Seven years later hundreds of colleges and universities, including Oberlin, have made that pledge.
Steve Mayer is the Chair of the Psychology Department, the Peace and Conflict Studies Program, and is the Norman D. Hendersen Professor of Psychology at Oberlin College. Based on Aldo Leopold’s concept of the land ethic, he was instrumental in developing the Connectedness to Nature Scale, which measures the extent to which people feel themselves to be a plain and simple member of the natural community. His work highlights how feeling connected to nature fosters pro-environmental behavior, well being, and problem solving ability. Since the scale was initially introduced, he has given numerous conference and invited talks on this work and the scale has been translated into over five languages. Presently, working on a large grant from the Great Lakes Protection Fund, he in collaboration with three other faculty at Oberlin College have been investigating how to “contextualize” real time feedback for electricity and water usage to not only increase conservation but to also shift people’s values towards a more connected with nature/pro-environmental orientation.
Rob Hopkins is the co-founder of Transition Town Totnes and of the Transition Network. He has many years experience in education, teaching permaculture and natural building, and set up the first 2-year full-time permaculture course in the world, at Kinsale Further Education College. He is author of The Transition Handbook, and publishes www.transitionculture.org, recently voted the 4th best green blog in the UK.
£850
All course fees include accommodation, food, field trips and all teaching sessions.
For further information about Schumacher College please see About the College
A limited number of bursaries are available for this course. If you are working on community collaboration and development around sustainability we encourage you to apply. Please click here on how to apply
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To provisionally reserve a place for 5 days, email us your contact details and the name of the course admin@schumachercollege.org.uk
We will hold the place for five working days for reservations – three weeks before a course or earlier. After five days we will automatically offer your place to someone else if we have not received your application.
