David Orr Quotes

Hope is a verb with its shirtsleeves rolled up.

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places. It needs people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And these qualities have little to do with success as we have defined it.

The plain fact is that the planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.

Were we to confront our creaturehood squarely, how would we propose to educate? The answer, I think is implied in the root of the word education, educe, which means "to draw out." What needs to be drawn out is our affinity for life. That affinity needs opportunities to grow and flourish, it needs to be validated, it needs to be instructed and disciplined, and it needs to be harnessed to the goal of building humane and sustainable societies. Education that builds on our affinity for life would lead to a kind of awakening of possibilities and potentials that lie dormant and unused in the industrial-utilitarian mind. Therefore the task of education, as Dave Forman stated, is to help us 'open our souls to love this glorious, luxuriant, animated, planet.' The good news is that our own nature will help us in the process if we let it.

It makes far better sense to reshape ourselves to fit a finite planet than to attempt to reshape the planet to fit our infinite wants

I love when the environmentalist David Orr says, “The planet does not need more ‘successful people.’ The planet desperately needs more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of all kinds. It needs people to live well in their places. It needs people with moral courage willing to join the struggle to make the world habitable and humane, and these qualities have little to do with success as our culture defines it.

The human mind is a product of the Pleistocene age, shaped by wildness that has all but disappeared. If we complete the destruction of nature, we will have succeeded in cutting ourselves off from the source of sanity itself. Hermetically sealed amidst our creations and bereft of those of the Creation, the world then will reflect only the demented image of the mind imprisoned within itself. Can the mind doting on itself and its creations be sane?

Hope is a verb with its sleeves rolled up,” David Orr, a leading environmental thinker, famously said back in 2008 in a conversation reported in the Earth Island Journal.17

it’s not necessarily helpful to talk about poetry as if it were a device to be assembled or a religious experience to be undergone. Rather, it would be useful to talk about poetry as if it were, for example, Belgium

Hope is a verb with the sleeves rolled up.

They were taught to be technicians, not thinkers, in a culture that is long on know-how and short on know-why.

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 twenty-first century. It is not education, but education of a certain kind, that will save us.

There is a story that some years ago an interested mother wrote to a principal of a school, ‘Don’t teach my boy poetry, he’s going to run for Congress.’ I’ve never taken the view that the world of politics and the world of poetry are so far apart.” They are united, Kennedy suggests, because their greatness depends on “courage”—it is what makes, as Frost might put it, “all the difference.

David W. Orr writes, in The Nature of Design, “We are losing the capacity to say what we really mean and ultimately to think about what we mean. We are losing the capacity for articulate intelligence about the things that matter most.

knowledge increased, but like the circumference of an expanding circle, ignorance grew as well.

The planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.

It is a poem about the necessity of choosing that somehow, like its author, never makes a choice itself—that instead repeatedly returns us to the same enigmatic, leaf-shadowed crossroads.

A dead writer often finds himself at the mercy of something other than friends.

We do not organize education the way we see the world. If we did, we would have departments of Sky, Landscapes, Water, Wind, Sounds, Time Seashores, Swamps, and Rivers.

The planet does not need more successful people. But it does desperately need more peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind. It needs people who live well in their places, people of moral courage willing to join the fight to make the world habitable and humane. And this has little to do with success as we have defined it. —David Orr, ecologist