A model for the reform of colleges and universities?

Oberlin, Ohio: Laboratory for a New Way of Life
An environmental-studies professor tries to reinvent his town for a future of scarcity

This northern Ohio college town is barely a blip on a map, far away from national centers of power. And yet people here are working on a plan that could make it a model for fundamentally reshaping the American economy and its society.

The architect of the plan is David W. Orr, a professor of environmental studies and politics at Oberlin College. More than a decade ago, he helped inspire a "green building" trend when he dreamed up the Adam Joseph Lewis Center for Environmental Studies, which remains one of the greenest college buildings in the country.

Now he wants to expand that vision to Oberlin and its surrounding area. The Oberlin Project, as it's called, joins town and gown to create a resilient community for a post-fossil-fuel era. When asked to describe the project, Mr. Orr conjures a picture of life in Oberlin—a city of 8,000 residents and students, 40 miles outside of Cleveland—many years into the future: The town and the college would be powered by renewable energy, with a smattering of new and renovated green buildings at the town's core—the first among them paid for by the college. A "greenbelt" of farms would pump food, wood, and fiber into the city, while a steady stream of money from the college and small businesses, like restaurants and furniture manufacturers, would flow back out to the farms. The college, the local community college, the local vocational school, and the city's elementary and secondary schools would rejigger their programs to prepare students to live in the future: a world short on oil, wracked by unstable weather, relying increasingly on sustainable design, regional industries, and local know-how. The town itself would be a laboratory for a new way of life.

"What colleges and universities can do, it seems to me, is serve as genuine anchor institutions," Mr. Orr says. "Intellectual leadership is going to be really important for moving forward in an era that is going to be radically different."

But does he privilege the institution too much, when most of the faculty at not experts in sustainable living nor are they wise? They'll be learners, just like the rest of the hoi polloi.

David W. Orr
The Oberlin Project and Full Spectrum Sustainability 



Ecoliteracy and Ecological Education

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