Following the recent change in climate, the Clarke Forum for Contemporary Issues held “Designing Resilience in a Black Swan Word,” a lecture on changing climates and preparing for sudden changes.

On Wednesday, March 27 the Clarke forum brought David Orr, professor of Environmental Studies at Oberlin College, to speak at campus.

In addition to teaching, Orr is the leader of the Oberlin project, a long-term project to revitalize the city of Oberlin and remake the college in a sustainable way. While the lecture was titled “Designing Resilience in a Black Swan World,” alluding to precautions that should be taken to deal with unpredictable events, Orr’s lecture proved more far-ranging than the title suggested.

Orr began with an overview of recent climatological research on the increasingly imminent threat of global warming. Despite featuring a plethora of graphs and statistics, the presentation steered clear of boredom, as Orr entertained the audience with amusing and often risqué asides and commentary. He argued that resources such as coal and other fossil fuels should not be treated as property, and that their use should be regulated and restricted. Much like it was declared that humans could not be owned and sold, he said, it should be decided that certain parts of nature should not be for sale. Orr also spoke more broadly about contemporary American society, referring back to psychologist Edward Bernays, who pioneered advertising and propaganda in the U.S. by relying heavily on Freudian psychology. According to Bernays, the public has been  conditioned by masses of advertisements (5000 ads a day, Orr said), and thus are taught to be docile, impulsive, and to prize instant gratification of the mind’s lower desires more than anything else. According to Orr, these conclusions do not bode well for designing a healthy future in the long term.

Orr ended his lecture with an outline of the Oberlin project, which has brought together various community members to design a town built on the principles of “Full Spectrum Sustainability,” as he calls it. He included a passionate plea for higher education to rise to the challenge; colleges like Dickinson, Orr said, “have to become laboratories of design” for a more sustainable future.