Sustainable society within reach, ecological designer says

If the summer’s crop of drought and wildfire headlines threatened to send you sliding into a sweaty, globally warmed pit of despair, you’ll find the words of David Orr inspiring, albeit in a tough-love kind of way. According to Orr, a pioneer in ecological design and Paul Sears Distinguished Professor and chair of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College, we already have the technology and know-how to create a world where every individual alive today can live a fulfilling, sustainable life. But only – and here’s our kick in the pants – if we act immediately to reduce our consumption of fossil fuels.
Consider, for starters, that to meet the goal of reducing annual global carbon emissions from the current 8.5 billion tons to a more sustainable 3 billion tons, Americans will have to reduce per-person carbon emissions from an average of 5 tons per year to roughly 0.3 of a ton per year. “The average car driven the average U.S. mileage emits its weight in carbon each year,” says Orr. “So, if you drive a 2-ton SUV for one year, you’ve exceeded your carbon emission allotment for the year seven times over before anything else is counted.”

Lest you’re tempted to slump back in front of the air-conditioner, Orr maps out a plan for reducing consumption step by step. Just make those steps quick ones. “Changes in our fossil energy consumption – hence, carbon emissions – are not optional but mandatory,” says Orr. “Our choice is whether we organize the transition or let circumstance and nature do it for us. The former path permits cautious optimism; the latter would be catastrophic at a scale difficult to imagine.”

“This is like the proverbial onion, and we have to start peeling off the layers,” says Orr. “First we stop buying things none of us really want to buy.” No one, he suggests, wants to buy pesticide residues or to spend money on gas wasted idling in traffic jams, or to pay – as a result of inefficient design – for two to three times more energy than we really need to run our homes and businesses. At the first level of reducing consumption we switch, as quickly as possible, to technologies that shrink our ecological footprint: We eat organic food, drive smaller and alternative-energy cars and use mass transit. We buy energy-efficient appliances and convert to solar energy.

San Francisco Chronicle