Nice article in BOM Magazine on Resilience and Sustainability

Greg Zimmerman, the executive editor of Building Operating Management (BOM) magazine, wrote a great cover story on the relationship between resilience and sustainability for the July issue of BOM. The print article, “To Focus on Resilience, Focus Also on Sustainability,” will be out in early July, but it is available online now.

It’s great to see this argument being made by others—that resilience and sustainability go hand-in-hand. It’s not an either-or situation. Here’s an excerpt from Greg’s article:

“By focusing on sustainability and resilience in tandem, facility managers have the ability to address two parts of one of the more nefarious climate feedback loops: The more energy required to cool buildings, the more greenhouse gases are released to the atmosphere. And the more greenhouse gases, the more heat gets trapped in the atmosphere, and the more energy required to cool buildings.”

You can read the full article at this link.

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.