Core Team

Alex Wilson, President
Dummerston, Vermont

Alex is the founder and president of the Resilient Design Institute. His focus on resilient design began following Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf Coast—leading to publication of The New Orleans Principles, which he edited. He has worked on resilience initiatives for the cities of New York, Boston, and Washington, DC, and he co-led the effort to create the LEED pilot credits on Resilient Design. He has lectured and written widely about resilient design, including a chapter in the book, Climate Adaptation and Resilience Across Scales, published in 2022 by Routledge.

Alex is also the founder of BuildingGreen, Inc. in Brattleboro, Vermont, an 15-person company that has served the design and construction industry with non-biased information on environmentally responsible design and construction since 1985. He is author of Your Green Home (2006), and co-author of Green Development: Integrating Ecology and Real Estate (1998), and the Consumer Guide to Home Energy Savings (1990, 9th edition, 2007). He has also co-authored a series of four guidebooks on quiet-water canoeing and kayaking for the Appalachian Mountain Club. (Contact: alex@resilientdesign.org).

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.