The New Orleans Principles

While The New Orleans Principles predated the formation of the Resilient Design Institute, it was seminal in creation of the institute. Alex was the editor and lead author of this set of guiding principles, along with two other documents that emerged from a series of charrettes organized following Hurricane Katrina in the fall of 2005.

The charrettes were organized by several Midwestern chapters of the U.S. Green Building Council and held in advance of the Greenbuild Conference in Atlanta in November 2005. Close to 200 people participated in the charrettes, including more than 30 from New Orleans and other Gulf Coast areas affected by the back-to-back hurricanes in October of that year. The flagship outcome of the charrettes was The New Orleans Principles: Celebrating the Rich History of New Orleans Through Commitment to a Sustainable Future. The includes ten guiding principles that are applicable to coastal locations seeking to rebuild following major tropical storms, especially areas with areas facing economic hardship.

The other two documents to emerge from the charrettes are Learning from Disaster: A Vision and Plan for Sustainable Schools and Revitalized Public Education in New Orleans in the Wake of Hurricanes Katrina and Rita and Gulf Coast Reconstruction: Creating a Disaster-Resilient and Sustainable American Gulf Coast.

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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.