Would you buy a used idea from this man?

I have heard David W Orr speak twice, some 15 years apart.  He gave the same talk each time – more or less.  The first occasion – it must have been over 20 years ago –  was in Bristol when he began his oration with: "The Earth is dying "  Rubbish, of course, but the audience loved it.  You could sense the thrill, and that squirrelling away of something to tell the grandchildren: 'I was there when David Orr told us we were killing the earth.'  I wish now that I had followed my immediate instinct to walk out in disgust at an academic so traducing his trade.

I was reminded of all this because I came across one of his better known quotes the other day in a piece written for the NUS.  He's also quoted in a current HEFCE draft strategy paper, but more on that later on.  Here is the quote (it's in cerise) embedded in its 1991 text:

If today is a typical day on planet Earth, we will lose 116 square miles of rainforest, or about an acre a second. We will lose another 72 square miles to encroaching deserts, as a result of human mismanagement and overpopulation. We will lose 40 to 100 species, and no one knows whether the number is 40 or 100. Today the human population will increase by 250,000. And today we will add 2,700 tons of chlorofluorocarbons to the atmosphere and 15 million tons of carbon. Tonight the Earth will be a little hotter, its waters more acidic, and the fabric of life more threadbare.

The truth is that many things on which your future health and prosperity depend are in dire jeopardy: climate stability, the resilience and productivity of natural systems, the beauty of the natural world, and biological diversity.

It is worth noting that this is not the work of ignorant people. It is, rather, largely the result of work by people with BAs, BSs, LLBs, MBAs, and PhDs. Elie Wiesel made a similar point to the Global Forum in Moscow last winter when he said that the designers and perpetrators of the Holocaust were the heirs of Kant and Goethe. In most respects the Germans were the best educated people on Earth, but their education did not serve as an adequate barrier to barbarity. What was wrong with their education? In Wiesel’s words: "It emphasized theories instead of values, concepts rather than human beings, abstraction rather than consciousness, answers instead of questions, ideology and efficiency rather than conscience."

The same could be said of the way our education has prepared us to think about the natural world. It is a matter of no small consequence that the only people who have lived sustainably on the planet for any length of time could not read, or, like the Amish, do not make a fetish of reading. My point is simply that education is no guarantee of decency, prudence, or wisdom. More of the same kind of education will only compound our problems. This is not an argument for ignorance, but rather a statement that the worth of education must now be measured against the standards of decency and human survival – the issues now looming so large before us in the decade of the 1990s and beyond. It is not education that will save us, but education of a certain kind.

There is much here than suggests you might like to read the whole thing, even if you think that the idea that any sort of education will save us (on its own, as is implied here) is just the worst sort of liberal wishful thinking.  However, whatever you think about the role of education, it's surely very ill-judged so comprehensively to bad-mouth what universities and academics do – especially as you hope to win hearts and minds, and shift values and practice.

So,  I'll not be buying DWO's much used idea. I think it might be much more productive to point to what higher education does well, and wonder how it might do more of it, and do it even better.  And, anyway, all this is to perpetuate the myth that it's individual actions that cause (and solve) problems, ignoring the powerful socio-economic structures that those same individuals find themselves having to operate within.