David Orr lecture critique

David Orr, author of Down to the Wire, gave a lecture on the climate collapse at Agnes Scott College Tuesday, January 26, 2010. His main focus was on how human’s caused the demise of our environment followed by the efforts society can make to alleviate these self-created issues. He proposes, in order to change into becoming more sustainable, people need to be educated and aware of how the ecosystem has changed and how we caused it. The beginning of the presentation consisted of facts about the rising temperature (which is up 1.8 degrees Celsius), the population increase, and the escalation of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere (which has increased up to 100 ppm in the last century). Once Orr informed the audience of the statistical data involving environmental changes, he states the flaws in the economic system, as well as provides solutions. He provides hope to the audience by planning to become energy efficient, using renewable energy resources, such as solar and wind, more homegrown businesses, improving the agricultural and food economy, educating, and researching alternative methods. David Orr convinced me of the severity of the “climate collapse” through the well-researched facts and persuasive presentation. I found the numbers regarding the carbon dioxide increase impossible to dispute. The examples he used to support his thesis were hauntingly true to society, how we have functioned and wasted resources once assumed limitless. When he reached the point of his presentation involving all of the efforts in motion to improve the current and future problems our environment needs, it displayed how many actions are being taken to accomplish this goal. Although his ideas seem to have distant deadlines for the work needed to restore, and ultimately reverse, the damage our culture has inflicted on the ecosystem, he swayed me to believe it is a feasible and necessary task at hand. Orr’s lecture provoked a mixture of skeptical questions and practical ideas that people can participate to help the environmental crisis. For instance, what is the rest of the world doing to carry weight in their part of the global reform of nature? How much do I recycling a can or pop enhance the environment? Does it really make a difference? What are viable ways I can help? Is turning down the heat that meaningful of a step of using energy more efficiently? What if Orr’s message and the facts fail to reach a broader audience? How do people still not believe the climate calamity? Though I am unacquainted with the answers of most of these questions, I still agree with Orr’s plan of amending the way we use resources. The most important aspect of David Orr’s presentation that struck home was when he began speaking of posterity, displaying photographs of his grandchildren, and including the preamble of the Declaration of Independence. If the wellbeing of our children and grandchildren is not a sufficient enough reason to change, I do not know what is.