Building Resilience 2019 Conference website live

Building Resilience 2019 Conference website home page.

For over a year the International Living Future Institute, the Resilient Design Institute, and BuildingGreen, Inc. have been working together to organize a national conference to address resilience in the built environment. Building Resilience 2019 will be held November 7-8, 2019 in Cleveland, Ohio, and it will bring together architects, engineers, planners, developers, building owners, municipal officials, and others who are interested in creating more resilient buildings in the face of a changing climate.

The program is about 80% complete and can be viewed on the conference website, which went live last week. I’m thrilled with the caliber of presenters we have lined up and the buzz the conference is generating. The portion of the program that I’ve been most involved with is a “Nuts + Bolts” track that will provide practical, ready-to-implement strategies for creating buildings that are more resilient to a wide range of disturbances. Over the coming weeks you’ll see these sessions fleshed out as we confirm presenters.

We’re anticipating that the conference will sell out, since attendance is being limited to about 400, so if you’re interested in joining us in November, you might want to register soon.

David W. Orr, Ph.D

David W. Orr is Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies & Politics, Emeritus. He also served as “Counselor to the President” of Oberlin College for ten years. He is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change and the Long Emergency (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and co-editor of three others. He has authored over 220 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications. In the past twenty-five years he has served as a board member or adviser to ten foundations and on the Boards of many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute, Bioneers, and the Aldo Leopold Foundation.

He is currently a Trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, Children and Nature Network, and the WorldWatch Institute. 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, leadership awards from the U.S. Green Building Council (2014) and from Second Nature (2012), and a lifetime achievement award from Green Energy Ohio and the North American Association for Environmental Education. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S., Europe, Latin America, and Asia. He headed the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past thirty years,” as “one of thirty milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy, and as one of “52 game-changing buildings of the past 170 years” by the editors of Building Design +Construction in January, 2016. He was instrumental in the design and funding of the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center. He is the founder of the Oberlin Project and a founder of the journal Solutions. His current work is on the state of American democracy.