David Orr is the Paul Sears Distinguished Professor of Environmental Studies and Senior Adviser to the President of Oberlin College. 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, including the widely praised Ecological Literacy (1992) and Earth in Mind (1994/2004); his most recent book is Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse.

The Book Democracy Unchained: How to Rebuild Government for the People

Web Series: The State of American Democracy 

In 1996 David 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.” He has served on the National Advisory Committee of the Presidential Climate Action Project, and is a Trustee of Rocky Mountain Institute and Bioneers.

David W. Orr  Professor of Environmental Studies and Politics Emeritus and senior advisor to the president of Oberlin College. He is a founding editor of the journal Solutions, and founder of the Oberlin Project, a collaborative effort of the city of Oberlin, Oberlin College, and private and institutional partners to improve the resilience, prosperity, and sustainability of Oberlin.

Orr is the author of eight books, including Dangerous Years: Climate Change, the Long Emergency, and the Way Forward (Yale, 2016) and Down to the Wire: Confronting Climate Collapse (Oxford, 2009) and coeditor of three others. He has authored over 200 articles, reviews, book chapters, and professional publications.

In the past 25 years, he has served as a board member or advisor to eight foundations and on the boards of many organizations, including the Rocky Mountain Institute and the Aldo Leopold Foundation. Currently he is a trustee of the Alliance for Sustainable Colorado and the Children and Nature Network.

He has been awarded eight honorary degrees and a dozen other awards including a Lyndhurst Prize, a National Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation, and a Visionary Leadership Award from Second Nature. Orr is a frequent lecturer at colleges and universities throughout the United States, Europe, and Asia.

While 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 and was instrumental in funding the Peter B. Lewis Gateway Center.

Maysoon Zayid  is an American actress and comedian. Of Palestinian descent, she is known as one of America's first Muslim women comedians and the first person ever to perform stand-up in Palestine and Jordan.

Zayid started her acting career by appearing on the popular soap opera As the World Turns for two years, as well as guest appearances on Law & Order, NBC Nightly News and ABC's 20/20.

During her early acting experiences, she found her disability and ethnicity repeatedly limiting to her advancement. Zayid then turned to stand-up and began appearing at New York's top clubs, including Caroline's, Gotham, and Stand Up NY, where she takes on serious topics such as the Israel-Palestine conflict.[citation needed]

She co-founded the New York Arab-American Comedy Festival in 2003 with comedian Dean Obeidallah. It is held annually in New York City and showcases Arab-American comics, actors, playwrights and filmmakers.

In late 2006, Zayid debuted her one-woman show Little American Whore (LAW) at Los Angeles's Comedy Central stage; it was produced and directed by Kathy Najimy. In 2008, LAW's screenplay was chosen for the Sundance Screenwriters Lab. Production began with Zayid as the lead in the fall of 2009.

Zayid had a role in the 2008 Adam Sandler film, You Don't Mess with the Zohan.

Zayid can be seen in the 2013 documentary The Muslims Are Coming!, which features a group of Muslim American stand up comedians touring the United States in an effort to counter Islamophobia, as well as various celebrities including Jon Stewart, David Cross, Janeane Garofalo and  Rachel Maddow. In December that same year she appeared on the Melissa Harris-Perry show on December 30, 2013 as part of a panel of comedian commentators. She has also presented at the TED annual conference and her TED Talk has been viewed approximately 1 billion times.

In June 2016 it was announced that Zayid would be developing a series about her life with Lindsey Beer.

Zayid has said repeatedly that she wants to appear on the ABC daytime soap opera General Hospital, and in June 2019 she debuted in the recurring role of Zahra Amir in the series.

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How To Vote In The 2020 Election In Every State. Everything you need to know about mail-in and early in-person voting in every state in the age of COVID-19, including the first day you can cast your ballot in the 2020 election. (FiveThirtyEight / NBC News / Wall Street Journal)*

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