CEE Seminar – Technological Fundamentalism – Dr. David W. Orr

Abstract: Our money says “in God we Trust” but our behavior says in a pinch we’d bet it all on technology. Trusted or not, God is a mystery. So too the science of quantum mechanics, for example, that underlies our smartphones, internet, and supercomputers.  “Not a human soul, alive or dead, actually gets it” according to Chilean writer Benjamin Labatut, “the mind cannot come to grips with its paradoxes and contradictions.” We are “like apes, toying and playing with it, but with no true understanding.” A pin stuck in the balloon of pretensions. That in a universe in which 95% is dark stuff about which we know virtually nothing except that our theories say it must be there—whatever it is. So, let’s talk about technology.

Even though much of it is beyond our comprehension, our hope is in better gadgets not better systems design or improvement of the “still unlovely human mind.” From the Titanic to Fukushima, however, hype exceeds the reality. Skeptics about technology are frequently dismissed as “Luddites” by people ignorant of the history and issues of early industrial development in Britain. It is a knee-jerk reaction that we recognize in other circumstances as fundamentalism—the hermetically-sealed assurance of infallibility no matter what the evidence. We need guidelines about technology.

Dr. David W. Orr

Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus (1990-2017), Counselor to the President, Oberlin College 2007-2017, and presently a Professor of Practice at Arizona State University.

He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward (Yale University Press, 2017), Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009), Design with Nature (Oxford, 2002), Earth in Mind (Island, 2004) and co-editor of four others including Democracy Unchained (The New Press, 2020). He was a regular columnist for Conservation biology for twenty years. He has also written over 250 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. He has served as a board member or adviser to eight foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, the Aldo Leopold Foundation, and the Bioneers. Currently, he is a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado and Children and Nature Network. He has been awarded nine honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, a “Visionary Leadership Award” from Second Nature, a National Leadership award from the U.S. Green Building Council, a Lifetime Achievement Award from the North American Association for Environmental Education, the 2018 Leadership Award from the American Renewable Energy Institute, and a Lifetime Achievement Award from Green Energy Ohio, He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, and Asia. He is a founder of: the Atlanta Environmental Symposium (1972-1974), the Meadowcreek Project (1979-1990), the Oberlin Project (2007-2017), the journal Solutions, and of the State of American Democracy Project 2017-present). He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center (https://bit.ly/3bx3C7m)  which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years;” . . . “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and selected as one of “52 game changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design + Construction Magazine  (2016). He was instrumental in the design and funding for the Platinum-rated Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center (hotel + conference center in Oberlin). His current work at Arizona State University is on the repair and strengthening American democracy.