Prophetic Possibilities: A Few Words on David W. Orr and a Healing Vision for America

How do we reimagine and remake the human presence on earth in ways that work over the long haul?

David W. Orr

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.

David W. Orr

As we lurch, at the order of our president, grotesquely into another war in the Middle East, a war snuffing out the lives of humans and various nonhuman creatures, a war that is opposed by most Americans, a war that’s playing fast and loose with the security of much of the world; as we suffer, yet again, the helpless awareness that our government, whose power is purportedly derived from “the consent of the governed,” is not in our hands; as we, like a herd of animals sensing an oncoming storm, intuit that the system—the incomprehensibly complex, elaborately technological, fragilely interrelated, global industrial system of which we and our government are part and which is bent on a “greed for gain which knows no limit and tends to infinity”—is perhaps beginning to collapse; as we collectively protect ourselves from knowledge of our own implicatedness in this system by armoring ourselves with speed and distraction and political hate; and as we witness our holy Earth—our town, the lake of our childhood, the faraway land visited while traveling—become more and more maimed by human influence, we seem to be (borrowing language from the Lakota) “crying for a vision.”

On our quest for a vision we could do worse than consider the work of David W. Orr, carefully consider his many essays and books published over the last few decades. Despite his eloquent words of prophetic challenge and prophetic possibility, Orr remains too little known in America.

And what is Orr’s vision?

In light of the variety of topics he’s written about (love, gratitude, water, oil, speed, scale, diversity, language, education, climate change, technology, science, scientism, spirituality, politics, leadership, citizenship, agriculture, conservation, localism, architecture, ecological design, the industrial economy, and others) and in light of the richness of his expression, attempting a summary of his vision seems a fool’s errand. But let me run that fool’s errand roundaboutly (and uncomprehensively) by sharing a list from his book Hope Is an Imperative, a list of things Orr believes every healthy community needs, a plainly worded but provocative list that I’ve been sharing with friends and students for years:

• front porches
• public parks
• local businesses
• windmills and solar collectors
• local farms and better food
• better woodlots and forests
• local employment
• more bike trails
• summer baseball leagues
• community theaters
• better poetry
• neighborhood book clubs
• bowling leagues
• better schools
• vibrant and robust downtowns with sidewalk cafes
• great pubs serving microbrews
• more kids playing outdoors
• fewer freeways, shopping malls, sprawl, television
• no more wars for oil or anything else

A healing vision for America, Orr suggests in his writings (and in the list above), is one faithful to the great nearby, to the gospel of the local, to the wisdom that sits in places, to what Benedictines call stabilitas loci. It is a vision wed to slowness, proportionality, beauty, art, to “peacemakers, healers, restorers, storytellers, and lovers of every kind.” It is committed to remaining human against all odds, to face-to-face encounter, technological prudence, hard work, self-reliance (“homespun resourcefulness,” Orr calls it), the decentralization of whatever can be decentralized, and integral livelihoods. A healing vision, Orr says (again and again and again), is one scrupulously mindful of future generations. (“We do not have to rob the world and steal from our children to live well.”) It is a vision that honors “tradition, obligations, physical reality, and our long-term prospects”; and one that is in harmony, as much as possible, with the laws—and other beings and forces—of the Earth. It is a vision based on “the art of applied wholeness,” on imaginative responsibility, and on acting out that responsibility by way of minute particulars. In an essay on his friend Wendell Berry, Orr revealingly invokes English historian and archaeologist Jacquetta Hawkes: “Jacquetta Hawkes … once described rural England of the eighteenth century as characterized by a ‘creative, patient, and increasingly skillful love-making that persuaded the land to flourish.’” David W. Orr’s vision, too, privileges such love.

And while Orr’s vision is radical (no incrementalist, Orr repeatedly says he doesn’t care to “tinker at the edge of the status quo”), it actually seems plausible. It seems to be a vision we could live up to and sustain because it’s predicated (unlike the sanguine chimeras of today’s tech boosters) on abiding by the facts of life instead of trying to rearrange them. Orr, again and again, reminds us that we are currently living beyond our means, that we are running afoul of the bounds of the natural world, of the ordinances set by God for existence. Instead, says Orr, we should build our economies—and communities—“on ecological realities,” on a design revolution that meshes how we provide food, shelter, energy, materials, livelihoods, and waste-management with the “larger patterns and flows” of the Earth. If we want an enduring America, Orr reasonably tells us, we need to ensure the integrity of natural systems. And these are not partisan notions, says Orr, not Left nor Right. They are common sense. “The alternative to chaos,” writes William Catton, author of Overshoot, “is to abandon the illusion that all things are possible.” At this moment in human history, at a time still (despite decades of warnings) delusionally and harmfully addicted to what Ivan Illich called “development euphoria,” those words—quoted by Orr—might surprise us with a cutaneous shiver.

“The fact is,” Orr writes in his wise, testy, lapidary book The Last Refuge, “that the industrial, extractive economy and its politics cannot be sustained.” Loudly and at times snarlingly suspicious of the fast, blind, abstracting, technocratic juggernaut that is modernity (“incoherence, disorder, and violence are the hallmarks of the modern world”), Orr calls us to redefine the good and proposes a thriftier, earthier, more reverent understanding of prosperity, a prosperity inseparable from the “art of inhabitation,” an art that involves what George Sturt, one of the last wheelwrights in England, described (in The Wheelwright Shop) as the “age-long effort … to fit close and ever closer” to one’s particular place. Relatedly, Orr invites us to see that “humans are embedded in a network of obligations and are kin to all life.” Apart from participation in this wider creaturely kinship, humans do not exist. “Our starting point,” Brother David Steindl-Rast wrote (using words Orr likely would admire), “must be the perspective of togetherness.”

David W. Orr’s vision calls us to see this togetherness by thinking systemically, by noting patterns of cause and effect, “the patterns that connect us across the divisions of culture, religion, geography, and time.” In an era that rewards a clever sort of intelligence, an intelligence tantamount to a cunning amoral gaming-of-the-system, tantamount to a headist, whole-blind knack for self-interested expediency, Orr’s intelligence (like Ellen Davis’s, Joanna Macy’s, Gary Snyder’s, Wendell Berry’s, and David Steindl-Rast’s) is about seeing, for the sake of the commonweal, the interrelatedness of things, the exquisite and infinite mutuality. You can call such seeing imaginative responsibility, the ecological imagination, or the piety of the open eye. Call it what you will, it is a deeper kind of intelligence than what’s privileged today, and it’s an intelligence we can’t do without. It broadens one’s sense of identity and enlarges one’s field of care. It sponsors the “elaborate courtesy” (Wendell Berry’s words) proper to stewardship and love. Intelligence attuned to the whole is intelligence in service of health, of the holy. And such intelligence is often inconvenient. In an incisive essay on 9/11 from his book The Last Refuge, Orr writes two sentences that speak, discomfortingly, to modern America regardless of the party in power:

In an ecological perspective … there are few accidents or anomalies, only outcomes based on system structure and dynamics. Climate change and glittering malls, Calcuttan poverty and sybaritic wealth, biotic impoverishment and economic growth, militarism and terrorism, global domination and utter vulnerability are not different things but manifestations of a single system.

To provide a better sense of Orr’s gift to us, let me get out of the way entirely and quote him at length:

I once asked a class to explain the dead zone, which is roughly the size of New Jersey, in the Gulf of Mexico, the fact that one-third of U.S. teenagers are overweight or obese, and the possible relationships between the two. After an hour, they had filled the blackboard with boxes and arrows that included federal farm subsidies, U.S. tax law, chemical dependency, feedlots and megafarms, the rise of the fast-food industry, declining farm communities, corporate centralization, advertising, cheap food policy, research agendas at land-grant institutions, urban sprawl, the failure of political institutions, cheap fossil fuel energy, and so forth. Most of the things described by those boxes, however, resulted from decisions that were once thought to be economically rational or at least within the legitimate self-interest of the parties involved. But collectively they are an unfolding continental-scale disaster affecting the health of people and land alike.

(From the essay “Leverage” in Hope Is an Imperative)

Ugliness is, I think, the surest sign of disease, or what is now being called “unsustainability.” Show me … neon ticky-tacky strips leading toward every city in America, and the shopping malls, and I’ll show you devastated rain forests, a decaying countryside … and toxic waste dumps. It is all of a fabric. And this is the heart of the matter. To see things in their wholeness is politically threatening. To understand that our manner of living, so comfortable for some, is linked to cancer rates in migrant laborers in California, the disappearance of tropical rain forests, 50,000 toxic dumps across the U.S.A. … is to see the need for a change in our way of life. To see things whole is to see both the wounds we have inflicted on the natural world in the name of mastery and those we have inflicted on ourselves and on our children for no good reason, whatever our stated intentions. Real ecological literacy is radicalizing in that it forces us to reckon with the roots of our ailments, not just with their symptoms. For this reason, it can revitalize and broaden the concept of citizenship to include membership in a planet–wide community of humans and living things.

(From the essay “Ecological Literacy” in Hope Is an Imperative)

The increasing velocity of knowledge is widely accepted as sure evidence of human mastery and progress. But many, if not most, of the ecological, economic, social, and psychological ailments that beset contemporary society can be attributed directly or indirectly to knowledge acquired and applied before we had time to think it through carefully. We rushed into the fossil fuel age only to discover the giant problem of climate destabilization. We rushed to develop nuclear energy without the faintest idea of what to do with the radioactive wastes. Nuclear weapons were created before we had time to ponder their full implications. Knowledge of how to kill more efficiently is rushed from research to application without much question about its effects on the perceptions and behavior of others, about its effects on our own behavior, or about better and cheaper ways to achieve real security. CFCs and a host of carcinogenic, mutagenic, and hormone-disrupting chemicals, too, are products of fast knowledge. High-input, energy-intensive agriculture is also a product of knowledge applied before much consideration has been given to its full ecological and social costs. Economic growth, in large measure, is driven by fast knowledge, with results everywhere evident in mounting environmental problems, social disintegration, unnecessary costs, and injustice.

(From the essay “Slow Knowledge” in Hope Is an Imperative)

Looking back, the last few decades should teach us that democracy is vulnerable to those, whether terrorists or ideologues of any sort, who flagrantly defy the rules of civility, tolerance, and public order. The history of Greek democracy … stands both as a beacon to the possibilities of self-governance and a warning about its fragility. Looking to the future, ours will one day appear as an oddly disoriented time. Many of the issues that fueled the passions of our day will appear to them as merely vaporous diversions from much larger issues. In particular, our obsession with consumption and individual rights to the neglect of collective rights will appear derelict, perhaps criminally.

(From the essay “Late-Night Thoughts About Democracy” in Down to the Wire)

Education is not widely regarded as a problem, although the lack of it is. The conventional wisdom holds that all education is good, and the more of it one has, the better. The truth is that without significant precautions, education can equip people merely to be more effective vandals of the earth…. We have fragmented the world into bits and pieces called disciplines. As a result after 12 or 16 or 20 years of education, most students graduate without any broad, integrated sense of the unity of things…. We routinely produce economists who lack the most rudimentary understanding of ecology or thermodynamics. This explains why our national accounting systems do not subtract the costs of biotic impoverishment, soil erosion, poisons in our air and water, and resource depletion from gross national product. We add the price of the sale of a bushel of wheat to the gross national product while forgetting to subtract the three bushels of topsoil lost to grow it. As a result of incomplete education, we have fooled ourselves into thinking that we are much richer than we are.

(From the essay “What is Education For?” in Earth in Mind)

Imagine a world in which those who purport to lead us first make a pilgrimage to ground zero at Hiroshima and publicly pledge “never again.” Imagine a world in which those who purport to lead us go to Auschwitz and the Killing Fields and pledge publicly “never again.” Imagine a world in which leaders go to Bhopal and say to the victims, “We are truly sorry. This will never happen again, anywhere.” Imagine those pilgrim leaders going to sites where love, kindness, forgiveness, sacrifice, compassion, wisdom, ingenuity, and foresight have been evident: Assisi, the home of Saint Francis; Le Chambon, where French villagers acted to save Jews during the Nazi occupation; a shelter for the homeless in New York City…. Imagine a world in which those who intend to lead help lift our sights above the daily crisis to the far horizon of what could be…. Imagine a world in which we expect leaders to be knowledgeable people who meet each year not to talk about economic growth, but about ecological and human health—a more complicated and pressing subject. Imagine a world in which those who purport to lead had actually read widely and thought deeply about the directions of technology, suffering, nature, agriculture, ethics, political philosophy, and the human future…. Imagine a time in which those who purport to lead us would have to understand the fundamentals such as how the Earth works as a physical system, the state of the planet … policies necessary for sustainability, economics suited for a small planet, ecological design, and techniques of conflict resolution.

(From the essay “Imagine a World: The Education of Our Leaders” in The Last Refuge)

History is a record of many things, most of which were not planned or foreseen. And after Auschwitz, Hiroshima, the H-bomb, gulags, and killing fields we know that at best it is only partially a record of progress. It is easy at this point to throw up one’s hands and conclude with the Kentucky farmer who informed the lost traveler that “you can’t get there from here.” That conclusion, however, breeds self-fulfilling prophecies, fatalism, and resignation—perhaps in the face of opportunities, but certainly in the face of an overwhelming need to act. We also have the historical examples of Gandhi, Martin Luther King, and Albert Schweitzer that suggest a different social dynamic, one that places less emphasis on confrontation, revolution, and slogans and more on patience, courage, moral energy, humility, and nonpolarizing means of struggle. And we have the wisdom of E.F. Schumacher’s admonition to avoid asking whether we will succeed or not and instead “leave these perplexities behind us and get down to work.”

(From the essay “The Problem of Sustainability” in Hope Is an Imperative)

The great poet and social critic Denise Levertov described “prophetic utterance” as speech that can “transform experience and move the receiver to new attitudes.” By my lights, David W. Orr’s many writings fit that description.

The darkness around us is deep. But “in a dark time,” says the poet, “the eye begins to see.” Vaclav Havel spoke penetratingly of the “self-momentum” of a power or system. This self-momentum, Havel said, is the unconscious, irresponsible, uncontrollable, and unchecked momentum that is no longer the work of people, but which drags people along with it and therefore manipulates them. And this momentum, Havel noted, is accompanied by a demoralization, a widespread inertia. Writer, scholar, and psychologist Randolph Severson writes, in an unrelated context, of demoralization as “a state of helplessness, hopelessness, purposelessness, and eroded sense of mastery, in which life’s narrative feels incoherent and the future empty … the heart’s energy dispersed among trivialities, base desires, or spiritual fatigue.” Severson adds that during demoralization “high aims lose motivational force; one knows the good yet fails to strive.” It further entails the “erosion of confidence that striving matters.” Echoing Severson, Havel says demoralization signifies the “willingness to surrender higher values when faced with the trivializing temptations of modern civilization.” Havel elaborates:

“A person who has been seduced by the consumer value system, whose identity is dissolved in an amalgam of the accoutrements of mass civilization, and who has no roots in the order of being, no sense of responsibility for anything higher than his own personal survival, is a demoralized person. The system depends on this demoralization, deepens it, is in fact a projection of it into society.”

It seems much of America is facing such a self-momentum and demoralization now. The system appears to be in the saddle, riding us. And there is a feeling of futility in the air, a loss of faith in the future, a shrug-the-shoulders resignation to our lot. Not sure how to respond to the dizziness of this moment (to the edgeless dream of our economy; to the various wars; to the mounting social and environmental disintegration; to our screen-addiction and the blitzkrieg of A.I.; to our bipartisan politics of reduction and abuse; to the cruel and unhinged behavior of the current administration), many of us retreat into a myopic dailiness, into the “frenetic-anesthetic,” into the gaudy but gray accoutrements of mass civilization, all the while losing interest in the prospect of active outward engagement with the commonweal, of extending care beyond our own noses, beyond our own doorstep. I am generalizing here and therefore writing reductively. Many, of course, do care and reliably act open-handedly (and perhaps you are one of them!). And many in recent days have taken to the streets to protest the current administration. Even so, I don’t ever recall such an energetic slough in my lifetime. I see it in young people and among peers: an atomized anomie, a shutting-down and closing-in. There are many reasons for this anomie, I know, and I don’t presume to know them all. But I suspect we are in part stunned—and this is something Orr posits, too—by the cussed firehose of information. Put differently (and changing metaphors), one of the symptoms of information sickness seems to be paralysis.

I would also contend that we find ourselves in this slough because—whether we admit it or not—we are fed up with the totalizing partisanship of today’s politics. I suspect that we all know, somewhere deep down, that what’s happening today, what’s besetting us, is not because of one group. It’s not those evil Republicans or those ridiculous Democrats. Today’s politicians are, in part, “blind executors of the system’s own internal laws” (to use more of Havel’s words). And yet our status quo thrives on polarizing partisanship, which leads us away from the necessary work of unhorsing the system. Put differently, today’s political discourse, by invariably engaging in shallow partisan blaming, doesn’t excite us with truth but attempts to lull us with lies—and we are, even if obscurely and unconsciously, repulsed, vitiated, and shriveled by those lies, by the endless parade of vaporous reductionist diversions.

But as Havel showed through his humane, brave, artful citizenship and leadership, such seemingly intractable momentums and demoralizations can be disrupted. They can transmute. Breakdown can lead to breakthrough, and nonviolently. With the help of many and working over many years, Havel succeeded in replacing a dictatorship with democracy and doing so without a bloody war. Randolph Severson asserts that healing means “the deepened capacity for courageous, responsible existence,” for “the restoration and elevation of human aspiration,” for “the heart’s energized orientation toward transcendent good, sustained by disciplined practice.” Havel arguably helped bring about such a healing in Czechoslovakia. He helped reteach Czechs (and many around the world) their own worth, their own relevance, and their own power, the power to act in service to one’s neighbor, to one’s community, to those who will come after us, and to this mysterious beautiful world. Vaclav Havel was a muse of agency. Responsibility, he often said, is destiny.

What are we Americans being asked to learn now? What might healing look like for us? What agency should we wake up to? What “transcendent good” might we pursue? David W. Orr, in a voice both visionary and practical, suggests it is to craft a “prosperous way down” in order to eventually make for a lasting, more beneficent settlement of this land now called America. A “prosperous way down” is not typical language in a country dominated by a daylight consciousness enthralled by triumphant everlasting ascent, and it certainly is not the language of American politicians who promise us more, more, more and up, up, up. But it is the language, I would submit, of an adult, of someone facing the facts. And going “down” needn’t have a negative connotation—that, I think, is a telling cultural misconception. “Heaven is under our feet,” said Thoreau, “as well as over our heads.” “The holy land,” added poet Kathleen Raine, “should be the place we live on.” So perhaps going “down” is not only about scaling back and doing without but returning—returning and knowing this Great Mystery as if for the first time. Perhaps we are ready to graduate from being a culture alienated from the very ground of its own being. Words from Harold Robbins, a leader in the Catholic Land Movement, a movement which sponsored a similar “prosperous way down,” speak to our condition. “The Land Movement,” Robbins powerfully wrote, “is realist. It rejects fashion; it rejects that denial of free will which is involved in the dogma of inevitable progress.” To reject the denial of free will which is involved in the dogma of inevitable progress: that is the clarity and gumption we need now. We are not powerless.

And it should be stressed that the prophetic possibilities Orr—and Gandhi and King and Schumacher and Havel and Harold Robbins—share with us are not achievable in the face of the society-sponsored prejudice that is today’s partisan hate. This is another momentum that needs to be disrupted. There is an attraction to collective hatred, no doubt. It brings a species of meaning to our lives; it gives one ground to stand on; it counters loneliness and a sense of powerlessness; it makes one feel tidy, psychologically organized. It can be clarifying. But it is an ill clarity. “Hidden within a group,” writes Vaclav Havel, “a pack, or a mob, every potentially violent person can dare to do more; each one eggs the other on, and all of them—precisely because there are more of them—justify one another.” These are troubling words, I’d say, words that look deeply into all of our eyes. Collective hatred, in other words, invites others within one’s collective to up the ante of malevolence. Such hatred also co-creates more of that which is hated. “When we act from a perception of another’s malevolence,” writer and psychologist Radhule Weininger reminds us, “we elicit that reactivity in them. When we act from a perception of their goodness, we reinforce that potential.”

And collective hatred, as I have suggested above, also shields us from the difficult work of reckoning with the roots of our ailments, of addressing the underlying rottenness of our system. It spares us the burden of acknowledging our own implicatedness and of having to change our way of life. In the confusion of political hate with constructive citizenship, we buffer ourselves from seeing soberly, broadly, deeply, and holistically, from connecting causes and effects. In fact, we need to foster the opposite of collective hatred. “We must interact with one another,” Sulak Sivaraksa reminds us, “if we are to find and address the root causes of suffering.” “Affection,” says Walt Whitman, “shall solve every one of the problems of freedom.” Before we dismiss such statements as irritatingly quaint, we should remember that they come from tested and seasoned souls of extraordinary mettle and that they echo the words of the wisest who have walked among us. As my sixteen-year-old daughter hauntingly said to me recently, we need to try to extend to each other “radical grace.” Such an extension is not the same as passivity, as standing idly by while our government acts destructively. We must not let our country continue to play the role of “rogue nation given to state terrorism,” “secretly arranged preemptive wars,” and a “cynical manipulation of patriotism” (Orr’s words). We cannot watch from the sidelines as our democracy dissolves, as people are violently disappeared into hidden-away detention centers and foreign mega-prisons, and as the Earth is poisoned and plundered. That said, we cannot mistake political engagement for, as Henry Adams once put it, “the systematic organization of hatreds,” for shunning and polarizing taunts and speaking with cocky morality to the convinced.

Rather, we somehow need to extend a forgiving humanity to each other, trusting that such extending will help us respond more effectively to our ills. The heart that has its reasons that reason does not know is perhaps our greatest strength now—it is perhaps the only way through this impasse, awesomely formidable as it is. To put it all another way, we not only need to immediately, intentionally, and vigorously address our errant government, we need to begin transitioning the destructive system that we all abet to something life-sustaining, and we need to do this, each of us, with a love that covers all offenses. A tall task! But as the wise tell us, we are not obliged to complete the task but neither are we free to abandon it. “If there is to be any chance at all of success,” Vaclav Havel adds, “there is only one way to strive for decency, reason, responsibility, sincerity, civility, and tolerance, and that is decently, reasonably, responsibly, sincerely, civilly, and tolerantly.”

When young Prince Siddhartha (the Buddha-to-be) left the family palace compound after many years of living a sheltered life of privilege, luxury, and ease, he saw a sick man, an old man, and a dead man. Until then Siddhartha had never experienced life’s grisly, tragic side. And the sights of the sick man, old man, and dead man disturbed him, causing in him a breakdown: a breakdown into bewilderment, fear, sadness, and despair. And this breakdown inspired his legendary renunciative journey, his long wayfaring that culminated in his awakening. Looking back on these disturbing encounters, the Buddha is said to have called them “heavenly messengers” for they set him on the path to healing.

Looking at our time and country in the manner of the Buddha, it appears that we are surrounded by heavenly messengers now. And they are trying to tell us something. May we be granted the gift of listening, inwardness, discernment, courage, and an undefended heart. And if you’re bewildered and despairing and can’t quite decipher the heavenly messages, perhaps David W. Orr (or Vaclav Havel or Sulak Sivaraksa or Walt Whitman) is someone to turn to.

Image Credit: Georgia O’Keeffe, “A Sunflower from Maggie” (1937)