Episode for September 15, 2021
Dr David Orr and Dr Miranda Yaver Episode 435
28 minutes David Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Senior Adviser to the President of Oberlin College. His career as a scholar, teacher, writer, speaker, and entrepreneur spans fields as diverse as environment and politics, environmental education, campus greening, green building, ecological design, and climate change. He is the author of six books, including the widely praised Ecological Literacy (1992) and Earth in Mind (1994/2004); his most recent book is Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse.
In 1996 David organized the effort to design the first substantially green building on a U.S. college campus. The Adam Joseph Lewis Center was later named by the U.S. Department of Energy as “One of Thirty Milestone Buildings in the 20th Century.” He has served on the National Advisory Committee of the Presidential Climate Action Project, and is a Trustee of Rocky Mountain Institute and Bioneers.
David W. Orr Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus and senior advisor to the president of Oberlin College. He is a founding editor of the journal Solutions, and founder of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity, and sustainability of Oberlin.
Orr is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and coeditor of three others. He has authored over 200 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications.
In the past 25 years, he has served as a board member or advisor to eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Currently he is a trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado and the Children and Nature Network.
He has been awarded eight honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, and a Visionary Leadership Award from Second Nature. Orr is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.
While at Oberlin, he spearheaded 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 30 years,” and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy and was instrumental in funding the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center.
From Miranda Yaver Website: I am a political scientist who in June 2019-2021 is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Fielding School of Public Health at the University of California, Los Angeles through the Los Angeles Area Health Services Research Training Program to conduct research on US health policy. In this capacity, I am conducting research on the ways in which political conditions shape the impact that policies have on public health outcomes, reproductive health policy, and nationwide survey research on health insurance utilization and related challenges of inequality stemming from insurer behavior in claim processing. I have additionally conducted survey research on the impact of COVID-19 on health care utilization, mental health, and access to sexual and reproductive health care.
Prior to this position, I was a Lecturer in Political Science at Tufts University, where I taught courses on American politics, public policy, and public law. In the 2016-17 academic year, I was a Lecturer in Political Science at Yale University, where I taught courses on American politics and quantitative methodology. In the 2015-2016 academic year, I was a Postdoctoral Research Associate in the Department of Political Science at Washington University in St. Louis. I completed my PhD in Political Science at Columbia University in 2015, with emphases in American Politics (major subfield) and Methodology (minor subfield). My dissertation, “When Do Agencies Have Agency? Bureaucratic Noncompliance and Dynamic Lawmaking in the United States, 1973-2010,” examines the conditions under which administrative agencies implement in ways that provoke constraints from Congress and the courts, often for behavior that I refer to as noncompliance.
My op-eds and other health care commentary has appeared in the New York Times, The Guardian, Washington Post’s Monkey Cage Blog, Rewire News, Public Seminar, Bustle, The Conversation, Medium, and KevinMD, and I have appeared on France 24 and CBC News to discuss American politics and policy. I was a 2013-14 Democracy and Markets Fellow at the Tobin Project. Prior to graduate school, I was engaged in political science and methodology research at UC Berkeley (go bears!), assisted with ESL and writing workshops in San Francisco, and worked on Democratic political campaigns as well as voting rights advocacy in Washington DC. A San Francisco Bay Area native, I received a B.A. with honors in Political Science from UC Berkeley in 2009. In addition to doing American politics and health policy research, I am a stand-up comedian who has performed comedy throughout New York City, New Haven, Boston, and Los Angeles. When not working or performing, I enjoy doing creative writing, catching live music, and watching sports (go NY Yankees, SF Giants, and Golden State Warriors!).
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