Wes Jackson and David Orr in Conversation

Wes Jackson is one of the foremost figures in the international sustainable agriculture movement. In addition to being a world-renowned plant geneticist, he is a farmer, author, and professor emeritus of biology.

He was a professor of biology at Kansas Wesleyan University, and a tenured full professor at California State University, Sacramento. There he established and chaired one of the first Environmental Studies programs in the United States. In 1976 he left academia to co-found The Land Institute, a nonprofit educational organization in Salina, Kansas. There he conceptualized Natural Systems Agriculture—including perennial grains, perennial polycultures, and intercropping, all based on the model of the prairie.

He is a Pew Conservation Scholar, a MacArthur Fellow, and a Right Livelihood Laureate (also known as the Alternative Nobel Prize). Smithsonian Magazine has said that Jackson’s mission is “the overthrow of agriculture as we know it,” and included him in its “35 Who Made a Difference” list in 2005. Life Magazine named him among the 100 “most important Americans of the 20th century.” He is a member of The World Future Council and the Green Lands, Blue Waters Steering Committee.

David W. Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics as well as Special Assistant to the President of Oberlin College and executive director of the Oberlin Project. He is perhaps best known for his pioneering work on environmental literacy in higher education and his leading role in the promising new field of ecological design.

Throughout his career he has served as a board member of or advisor to eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. He is a trustee of Bioneers, the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado, and the Worldwatch Institute.

At Oberlin he spearheaded the effort to design, fund, and build the Adam Joseph Lewis Center, which was named by an AIA panel in 2010 as “the most important green building of the past 30 years” and as “one of 30 milestone buildings of the twentieth century” by the U.S. Department of Energy. The story of that building is told in two of his books, The Nature of Design (2002), which Fritjof Capra called “brilliant,” and Design on the Edge (2006), which architect Sim van der Ryn describes as “powerful and inspiring.”