I remember a warm spring day some years ago. I was taking down the storm windows on our little rural church, supervised by the oldest man in the congregation. When we were done, we sat down on the stoop out front, a truly massive piece of local granite. Don began talking about the day in his boyhood when the men of the town had cut that slab of stone, hitched it to a team, and rolled it a mile to the church on pine logs. I wasn't paying much attention to his discourse on chisels and harnesses—it seemed unlikely I'd ever be called on to do the same. But gradually it dawned on me that he was describing something more important than building technique: the ability to get a community to work together toward some common end. Such cooperation is a technology of sorts, and it's in steep decline.

David Orr's new book reminded me of that day. It's an account of one of the most efficient and sustainable buildings on any college campus anywhere—an account of the technological advances required, and also of the many human factors that very nearly derailed its construction. And it allows us to understand why we'll need to cleverly maneuver both the technological and the human track to have any hope of avoiding the ecological abyss we find ourselves approaching.

Orr is an interesting figure, the author of the highly regarded Earth in Mind, about environmental education, and a frequent and fiery lecturer on campuses around the country. The son and grandson of ministers, he's director of the environmental studies program at Oberlin College in Ohio, whose first superstar faculty member was the evangelist Charles Grandison Finney. The college was also an early educator of women and African Americans, and if it has shed its theological roots it has not shed its moral passion for many causes, including the environment.

Hence it made sense for Orr to let his imagination run when he imagined a new headquarters for his environmental studies program. The Adam Joseph Lewis Center was intended to be "an example of the highest possible standards of ecological architecture" that "would cause no ugliness, human or ecological, somewhere else or at some later time," a standard that meant carefully examining the sources of all materials—the mines, the forests, the factories—to ensure that nothing was done to "impair human dignity or the integrity of ecological systems." Instead of an "anonymous place where education happened disconnected from place," it was supposed to "reconnect a mostly urban clientele with soils, trees, animals, landscapes, energy systems, water." In one of the cloudiest corners of the country, the design team he assembled from students, faculty, and staff wanted a building with lots of daylight streaming in, and most of its power coming from solar panels. Water should be as clean leaving the building as it had been when it entered. Finally, the Lewis Center would be "designed to evolve over time," instead of needing to be replaced a generation or two hence. In other words, a very tall order—especially on a campus without an enormous endowment.

But it would be an undeniably fine thing to produce a better building—we need them badly. As Orr points out, about 40 percent of the country's raw materials and energy go to constructing, operating, and maintaining buildings. And it's not just us, of course—two-thirds of the planet's construction cranes can be found in China, where 40 percent of the world's cement is currently being poured. By Orr's estimation, humans may erect more buildings in the next fifty years than in the last five thousand. If these buildings waste energy—if they're the stationary equivalent of suvs—than any hope of dealing with global warming will be greatly diminished. A car fleet turns over about once a decade, but buildings—as college campuses around the country amply demonstrate—tend to stick around.

So: high goals, high stakes. As it turns out, the technology was the easy part. Orr and his campus committee hired some top outside designers, like eco-pioneer William McDonough, and set to work with a series of charettes, the brainstorming sessions that begin most architectural projects. It's a marvelous process to go through—the sense of possibility that emerges from even beginning to think outside the literal box of conventional architecture is contagious. Good ideas flow one upon another. The designers could have gone in many directions, including using low-tech materials like, say, straw bales encased in plaster. But they opted instead for all kinds of interesting state-of-the-art ideas, including geothermal heating, occupancy sensors to turn systems on and off, heat-recovery systems, and the piece de resistance, a so-called Living Machine, developed by the visionary biologist John Todd, to treat all the building's waste with a series of artificial ponds and wetlands.

The parallel task was building support for the project among donors and administrators on campus, and here things went much less well. Orr devotes half the book to telling the story of the torment he suffered in the course of the project, as dean after vice-president tried to knock it off track, trim its potential, even kill it outright. One fellow faculty member, he says, became so obsessed with proving the project a mistake that, "with the religious zeal of a self-appointed Tomas de Torquemada" he wrote letters to the editor and articles for right-wing magazines.

As it turns out, the unnamed critic had at least some grounds for complaint. When it first went into operation, the building didn't perform as well as advertised—something Orr says was natural with this much new technology. Some of it was embarrassing—the Living Machine wasn't getting enough human waste from the toilets to get up and running, and so needed to be "jumpstarted" with dogfood; even later, the rumor mill produced stories of students being paid a quarter a visit to use the new building's bathrooms. Eventually, though, as systems were fine-tuned, a team from the National Renwable Energy Laboratory reported that indeed the Lewis Center was using only about a third of the energy typical for a building its size. "There was an audible sigh of relief from the administrators," Orr reports. "Our chief critic became noticeably quieter, but did not disappear."

By a larger benchmark, however, the process failed. When Oberlin two years later built a big new science building, they didn't incorporate much if anything of what had been learned from the Lewis Center project. The energy use of the science building, Orr says, was twice what it should have been. If the point of the exercise had been to build a model to be followed, the student that should have been paying the most attention—Oberlin—seemed not to have noticed.

How could this be? Orr devotes much of the book to a critique of higher education, assailing colleges and universities for failing to function as what management gurus call "learning organizations." Instead, he says, the division into walled-off departments, the lack of risk-taking, and the other sins of academe make real change nearly impossible. "From the tower of Babel of competing disciplines, subdisciplines, and research projects, one does not talk much about the coherence of worldviews relative to natural systems… . What does seem to get our attention, alas, has to do with parking permits, retirement benefits, promotions, salary raises, and the enhancement of our particular fiefdoms." Socrates, he says, would never get tenure.

All of which is true enough—and a depiction of the human condition. It is unwise, I think, to expect such things to change with the speed necessary to attack our environmental problems. Which doesn't mean we should surrender; rather, we need to figure out how to make those institutions work to the necessary ends, which often involves figuring out how and when to fight and, more important, how to avoid combat. In recent years I've had the privilege of working on the fringes of a campus much like Oberlin, Vermont's Middlebury College, as it has emerged at the very forefront of campus response to environmental issues. There are no signature buildings—indeed, the environmental studies program is currently renovating an old campus dorm as its new headquarters, which is not as sexy as the Oberlin project but equally worthy, perhaps, as an example of creative recycling. But the entire student body and administration (led by an administrator named Nan Jenks-Jay, whom Orr credits as a mother of the campus sustainability movement) has slowly gotten in harness around the goal of reducing carbon emissions. Strategies range from dramatic increases in local food purchases to new boilers that burn local wood instead of distant oil. It's been accomplished, so far, with very little confrontation—the college treasurer is a convert to the work because students demonstrated the potential savings; the board of trustees has not stood in the way and sometimes even seems to be caught up in the excitement.

It's quite possible that change simply requires different types of people, some of them prophets and some of them managers. Prophets tend to be prickly. At one point, Orr talks about his years in a big political science department and says he found that only 2 of his 36 colleagues were really worth much. "Basketball and basking comfortably in self-satisfaction were the main sports," he says. Maybe so, but 2 in 36 seems a bad ratio even for political science. It was probably tough to talk hoops with Jeremiah too.

So at this point, as surely as we need prophets we also need those who can take vision and make it real. And happily they are beginning to emerge. The New York Times reported in October that some of Orr's former students, who had worked on the Oberlin building, had succeeded in winning approval for a new environmentally friendly downtown revitalization project in the Ohio town—a sign that perhaps the lessons of his work are beginning to sink in. Meanwhile, the Association for the Advancement of Sustainability in Higher Education held its inaugural meeting at Arizona State in September, with 700 campus environmental coordinators and other administrators from around the country. They may be, in the main, less visionary than Orr, whose work helped inspire the society's formation, but they make up for it with their skill at the cultural aspects of building community. Some of them know how to organize the town to move the slab of stone.

Bill McKibben is scholar in residence in Environmental Studies at Middlebury College. His 1989 book The End of Nature has recently been reissued with a new introduction (Random House).

Copyright © 2007 by the author or Christianity Today/Books & Culture magazine.
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