Parallel Plenary Speakers

Tuesday, October 11 Parallel Plenary Speakers

Global University Network For Innovation (GUNI) Panel

Global University Network For Innovation (GUNI) will host a Parallel Plenary Panel titled: Moving from Understanding to Action: Breaking Barriers for Transforming Higher Education’s Commitment to Sustainability. This session will explore the research outcomes of the GUNI study on the transformation of Higher Education towards sustainability. The aim of the session will be to discuss the barriers or difficulties that prevent HEI’s from achieving this transformation and to propose solutions on how to overcome challenges.

The panel will specify the solutions through suitable and concrete actions. GUNI will follow up with the discussion outside of the session by inviting participants to the Barriers Working Group at the GUNI Knowledge Community, an on-line platform for building knowledge together based on web 2.0.

Panelists:

  • Jesús Granados, Global University Network for Innovation, Universitat Politècnica de Catalunya, Barcelona
  • Daniella Tilbury, University of Gloucestershire, United Kingdom
  • Tarah S.A. Wright, Dalhousie University, Nova Scotia, Canada

David Orr David Orr_0.jpg

David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics and Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College and a James Marsh Professor at the University of Vermont. He is the recipient of five honorary degrees and other awards including The Millennium Leadership Award from Global Green, the Bioneers Award, the National Wildlife Federation Leadership Award, a Lyndhurst Prize acknowledging “persons of exceptional moral character, vision, and energy.” He has been a scholar in residence at Ball State University, the University of Washington, and other universities. He has lectured at hundreds of colleges and universities throughout the U.S. and Europe. He has served as a Trustee for many organizations including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He has been a Trustee and/or advisor to ten foundations.

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 and co-editor of three others. Ecological Literacy (SUNY, 1992), described as a “true classic” by Garrett Hardin, is widely read and used in hundreds of colleges and universities. A second book, Earth in Mind (1994/2004) is praised by people as diverse as biologist E. O. Wilson and writer, poet, and farmer, Wendell Berry.

In 1987 he organized studies of energy, water, and materials use on several college campuses that helped to launch the green campus movement. In 1989 Orr organized the first ever conference on the effects of impending climate change on the banking industry. Co-sponsored by then Governor Bill Clinton, the conference featured prominent bankers throughout the mid-South and leading climate scientists including Stephen Schneider and George Woodwell.

In 1996 he 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,” and by The New York Times as the most interesting of a new generation of college and university buildings. The Lewis Center purifies all of its wastewater and is the first college building in the U.S. powered entirely by sunlight. But most important it became a laboratory in sustainability that is training some of the nation’s brightest and most dedicated students for careers in solving environmental problems. The story of that building is told in two books, The Nature of Design (Oxford, 2002) that Fritjof Capra called “brilliant,” and a second, Design on the Edge (MIT, 2006), that architect Sim van der Ryn describes as “powerful and inspiring.”

Orr’s political writings appear in, The Last Refuge: Patriotism, Politics, and the Environment in an Age of Terror (Island Press, 2004), and articles such as “The Imminent Demise of the Republican Party” written in January of 2005.

In an influential article in the Chronicle of Higher Education 2000 Orr proposed the goal of carbon neutrality for colleges and universities and subsequently organized and funded an effort to define a carbon neutral plan for his own campus at Oberlin. Seven years later hundreds of colleges and universities, including Oberlin, have made that pledge.
Recent projects include a two year $2.2 million collaborative project to define a 100 days climate action plan for the Obama administration, and a project with prominent legal scholars across the U.S. to define the legal rights of posterity in cases where the actions of the present generation might deprive posterity of “life, liberty, and property.” He is also active in efforts to stop mountaintop removal in Appalachia and develop a new economy based on ecological restoration and wind energy. He is the author of Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford University Press, 2009).

Leith Sharp Leith Sharp Headshot_0_0.JPG

Leith has spent the last 19 years working to drive sustainability into the core business of the higher education sector. As a student in 1993, Leith was elected to be the student union environment officer at the University of New South Wales, one of the largest universities in Australia. In 1995 Leith was hired to be the University’s first environment manager with the job of establishing one of world’s first campus sustainability programs.

Over five years Leith instituted funding and business strategies to build a team of 10 staff working on transportation, a green office program, large scale onsite composting, a greenhouse gas reduction program, an eco-living demonstration home and more. For her innovative work in Australia, Leith received numerous awards including a Churchill Fellowship and Young Australian of the Year (Environment Category). In 1999, Harvard University recruited Leith to become the founding director of what was to become Harvard’s Office for Sustainability (formerly the Harvard Green Campus Initiative). By 2008, Harvard had the largest green campus organization in the world including a $12 million revolving loan fund, over 50 LEED buildings (88+ today), many renewable energy projects, behavior change programs, student engagement initiatives, an aggressive GHG reduction program and much more.

Under her leadership, Harvard became a recognized global leader in campus sustainability, receiving the highest national green campus ratings from the Princeton Review, the Sustainable Endowments Institute, the Sierra Club and Grist. To achieve this in such a large, decentralized and complex organization, Leith established entrepreneurial business models, built a team of 24 change management professionals, fostered a network of engaged champions across Harvard, and deployed a variety of change management strategies to ignite a sea change in the culture of the institution.

For her work at Harvard Leith received numerous awards including an Honorary Life Membership from the Boston Society of Architects. In 2009, Leith was recruited to be the start-up Executive Director for the Illinois Green Economy Network, a partnership of 48 community college Presidents working together to drive green economic growth across the state. In this role, Leith successfully established a national model for effective state-wide college collaboration to green the curriculum, workforce training, campus and communities. Leith has published numerous articles, papers and book chapters and has taught change management for sustainability at Harvard for the last 9 years, training over 600 people in the art of effective change management.

Leith has developed a variety of insights, frameworks and approaches which she has shared as a speaker, teacher and consultant, both nationally and internationally, to help hundreds of higher education organizations to drive sustainability into their core business. Leith is currently working on a book, consulting and volunteering as the founding Chair of the Sustainability Futures Academy, an international collaboration between developing and developed countries to drive sustainability into the core business of higher education. Leith has a bachelor of engineering (environmental engineering) from the University of New South Wales and a Master of Education (human development and psychology) from Harvard University.

Dr. Mitchell Thomashow MItch Thomashow_0.jpg

Dr. Mitchell Thomashow devotes his life and work to promoting ecological awareness, sustainable living, creative learning, improvisational thinking, social networking, and organizational excellence. Currently he is engaged in teaching, writing, and executive consulting, cultivating opportunities and exchanges that transform how people engage with sustainability and ecological learning.

Most recently, from 2006-2011, Thomashow was the president of Unity College in Maine. With his management team, he integrated concepts of ecology, sustainability, natural history, wellness, participatory governance, and community service into all aspects of college and community life. This included construction of The Unity House, the first LEED Platinum President’s Residence in North America, the TeraHaus, a passive house student residence, comprehensive campus energy planning, an integrated approach to growing food on campus, and a new academic master plan.

Previously from 1976-2006, Thomashow was the Chair of the Environmental Studies program at Antioch University New England. He founded an interdisciplinary environmental studies doctoral program and worked collaboratively to grow and nourish a suite of engaging Masters programs, geared to working adults.

Thomashow is the founder of Whole Terrain, an environmental literary publication, originating at Antioch University New England, and “Hawk and Handsaw,” a journal of creative sustainability, published at Unity College. He serves on the board of the Coalition on Environmental and Jewish Life (COEJL) and the advisory board of Orion Magazine. Thomashow is a founding member of the Council of Environmental Deans and Directors (CEDD), a national organization that supports interdisciplinary environmental studies in higher education. He serves as a consultant to Second Nature and the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education (AASHE).

His two books have significantly influenced environmental studies education. Ecological Identity: Becoming a Reflective Environmentalist (The MIT Press, 1995) offers an approach to teaching environmental education based on reflective practice—a guide to teachers, educators and concerned citizens that incorporates issues of citizenship, ecological identity, and civic responsibility within the framework of environmental studies. Bringing the Biosphere Home, (The MIT Press, 2001) is a guide for learning how to perceive global environmental change. It shows readers that through a blend of local natural history observations, global change science, the use of imagination and memory, and philosophical contemplation, you can learn how to broaden your spatial and temporal view so that it encompasses the entire biosphere. A recent essay (2010), “The Gaian Generation: A New Approach to Environmental Learning” provides radical new concepts for teaching about global environmental change.

Thomashow is currently working on four writing, networking, and teaching projects.

  • The Nine Elements of A Sustainable Culture provides a framework for advancing sustainable living and teaching in a variety of campus environments. It is the knowledge basis for his workshops on Organizational Leadership and Sustainability.
  • Sixty Over Sixty is a compilation of short essays and photographs by exemplary elders who personify flourishing lives of service.
  • Improvisational Excellence suggests that improvisation emulates the patterns and processes of the biosphere. It’s a series of essays linking play, music, and observing nature to the paths of everyday living. It is the philosophical basis for Thomashow’s workshops on global environmental change, music and nature, and ecological perception.
  • Wilson’s Library is a series of prose poems depicting extraordinary moments during the history of life on earth.