Back from another rich and stimulating week in Norway where I took part in the annual Nobel Peace Prize celebrations, this time honoring the International Atomic Energy Agency and its director general Mohamed ElBaradei. This year’s events lacked some of the excitement of 2002 when Jimmy Carter got the prize and it paled in comparison with the festivities of 2001 when over a dozen Nobel laureates gathered in Oslo for the 100th anniversary of the prize and when the award was handed out to Kofi Annan and the United Nations. Still, it was a good and interesting time with many special highlights. My photo essay from Nobel Days 2005 is available here.

My dialogue with James Hillman — On Soul, Character and Calling — is now available in a Spanish translation by Enrique Eskenazi and an Italian translation by Rinaldo Lampis. Thanks to Enrique and Rinaldo for making this piece accessible to new readers. I’ve also significantly expanded the original piece, incorporating the full text of the interview as it appeared in The Sun magazine some years ago.

I’ve added three new book reviews: Fritjof Capra’s The Web of Life, a study of the shift from mechanistic to systems thinking taking place in the sciences; Gail Bernice Holland’s A Call for Connection, a survey of new ideas and trends pointing to the emergence of a more holistic worldview in the West; and George Lakoff’s Moral Politics, a controversial examination of “how liberals and conservatives think.”

Just back from a beautiful and enchanting week at the 2005 Burning Man festival. This year’s event was, by many accounts, the best ever. The weather was nearly perfect, the art first-rate, and the overall vibe, well, incredible. A photographer’s dream. I have gathered a series of 100 photos from the event here. A very special thanks to all the wonderful people who allowed me to take their photograph, who shared their personal stories, and who otherwise welcomed me into their world this year. It was a week to remember.

WorthyRead is a new UK-based literary blog that regularly publishes reviews of worthy new and old books. Its mission is to review not only current bestsellers, but also older, or more obscure books. In general, WorthyRead’s aim is to give the reader a general impression and “feel” of a book’s style and content. This month the site will begin posting some of my own reviews, beginning with Brian Appleyard’s alternative history of science, Understanding the Present, a book that first appeared in 1992 but is more timely than ever. If you love book reviews as much as I do, be sure to subscribe to WorthyRead’s regular RSS feeds.

SCOTTLONDON.COM is in the throes of a much-needed facelift. The makeover is almost complete. The site has a new look and several important new features. The most obvious change is the addition of more graphic content, including a special section devoted to image galleries and photo essays.

I’ve also introduced a guestbook — a much-requested feature that allows visitors a chance to drop me a line and, more importantly, respond to the material on the site. (Some of the guestbook entries were originally sent to me as e-mails, but I’m making them public here — hopefully without offending anyone — to encourage open discussion and constructive criticism.)

In addition, I’ve revamped the site index, posted a list of the ten most popular pages, and added an overview of material related to civic renewal.

Finally, I’ve introduced a news page. Many people encouraged me to add a blog to the site, but I had mixed feelings about it. First of all, I thought, does the world really need one more blog? And secondly, isn’t there more to life than sitting at the computer writing up a blow-by-blow? So, the news page tries to strike a balance between a blog and a periodic update. It offers a place for commentary, ideas, recommendations and news. (It also replaces my electronic newsletter “London Calling.”)

This marks the first major overhaul of the site in five years. If you’re interested in how it has evolved over the years, read about this site.

Please do send me your thoughts about the new changes — what works, what doesn’t, dead links, etc. Are there elements that are confusing, redundant, pointless, infuriating? Any and all feedback is much appreciated.

I have just seen the manuscript of a forthcoming collection of interviews with Terry Tempest Williams. Among the dialogues in the book is an interview I conducted with her ten years ago entitled The Politics of Place. The collection also features interviews by Derrick Jensen, Michael Toms, David Kupfer, and Aria Seligmann, among others. Editor Michael Austin puts it very well in his introduction. “Like her books,” he says, Williams’ interviews “are suffused with the passions of her life — her family, her relationship to the land, her passion for words, and her unwavering sense of courage and personal integrity — and can be read profitably by those unfamiliar with her other work. For those familiar with her books, however, Williams’s interviews are a special treat. They sparkle with anecdotes, observations, clarifications, and even confessions that are not available in any other source.” The book, which is being published by Utah State University Press, will be out in the summer of 2006.

A fascinating and disturbing article in today’s New York Times examines how the Chinese have displayed “an American-style passion for the automobile.” Nowhere is this more apparent than in the city of Shanghai, writes reporter Howard French. “For Shanghai, as for much of China, getting rich and growing attached to cars have increasingly gone hand in hand, and have produced side effects familiar in cities that have long been addicted to automobiles — from filthy air and stressful, marathon commutes to sharply rising oil consumption.”

I remember a conversation seven or eight years ago with the late economist Robert Theobald. He and I were commiserating about the latest reports on the state of the environment. Our future as a civilization hinges on whether we can find a more ecologically sustainable model, he told me. And we only have a few years to turn things around.

“The problem is that we’re now living in a global culture and there is no one to take up a new model,” he said. “The Chinese are the logical ones to take up a new model, but they have bought into exactly what we’re doing, which is fatal because of the environmental question. If the Chinese decide that they are going to have the American standard of living, the environmental ballgame is over.”

The full interview, one of many I had with Theobald before he died, is available here. See also my review of his book The Rapids of Change.

My interview with Bill Mollison, Permaculture: A Quiet Revolution appears in the Summer 2005 issue of the journal Green Living. The principles of permaculture are simple, Mollison says. “The only ethics we obey are: care of the earth, care of people, and reinvestment in those ends.” Incidentally, the whole issue of Green Living is good. There is an especially interesting conversation with Marshall Rosenberg, the great psychologist, mediator, and proponent of non-violent communication.

A couple of years ago, the Pew Partnership for Civic Change and the Kettering Foundation invited me to take part in a series of dialogues among prominent foundation executives and nonprofit directors about the challenges of community-building. While the grantmaking community is reluctant to openly admit it, there is a pervasive sense today that community development programs, for all their good intentions, routinely fall short of their goals. All too often, they fail to tap into vital civic resources and energy, build effective relationships with the public, develop broad-based networks and coalitions, and sustain the commitment over the long haul.

What can foundations and nonprofits do to address the problem? This was the focus of three day-long dialogues, held over a twelve-month period, in Washington D.C. The conversations were rich, thought-provoking, perhaps even ground-breaking. Crafting more effective strategies, the participants believed, has to begin by paying greater attention to how communities come together to name and frame their problems, finding entry points for working with a diversity of people in the community, fostering integrative and sustainable partnerships, and developing more enlightened evaluation practices that reflect both qualitative and quantitative measures of community development.

The dialogues served as the basis for a report, Investing in Public Life, which was published last month. In it, I outline a range of strategies for accomplishing these goals. I also set forth some practical ideas for foundations and nonprofit organizations committed to building and strengthening local communities.

I’ve recently returned to several books from the 1960s and 1970s that were widely read and hotly debated at the time but have been largely forgotten in the intervening years. These titles are all out of print at this point. It’s a shame because they are brimming with far-sighted ideas, compelling insights, and still-timely wisdom.

Former University of Chicago physicist John Rader Platt wrote a wonderful little book in the mid-60s called The Step to Man, a lucid and highly original meditation on humanity’s next evolutionary leap. It makes some of today’s so-called new age ideas seem unoriginal and downright uninspired by comparison.

The iconoclastic French philosopher Jean-Francois Revel wrote a book in the early 1970s with the irresistible title Without Marx or Jesus that nicely sums up the existential crisis of our time. As he saw it, we find ourselves in a curious and somewhat painful predicament now that we can no longer fall back on ready-made ideologies and comfortable systems of belief. So what’s left? Where do we take refuge? That’s the question Revel says is haunting us as we transition into the 21st century.

I’ve also been rediscovering the genius of Kenneth Boulding, the late futurist and economist (and an old friend of my family, as it happens). His book The Meaning of the Twentieth Century is still amazingly fresh and original though it was written some forty years ago.

Finally, there’s Lewis Mumford, someone I return to again and again for ideas and inspiration. A towering intellect and a creative thinker. Almost all of his books are first-rate, but lately I’ve been reading The Transformations of Man, a masterful survey of those rare and pivotal moments in human history when an entirely new way of perceiving the world broke into popular consciousness and thereby changed the course of civilization.

For the past couple of months, I have been working on a project aimed at assessing post-tsunami reconstruction in Sri Lanka. The question we’re asking is whether the massive relief effort in South Asia is working as intended — whether people are receiving the aid they have been promised, whether they have a voice in the redevelopment process, and what can be done on the part of western aid organizations and charities to better assist those in need during the transition.

The project team consists of a small development staff in California, three field researchers in Sri Lanka, a Boston-based webmaster, and a dedicated group of student researchers at several University of California campuses. The initiative also has a distinguished advisory board made up of prominent activists, academics, and development experts.

The project website, just unveiled, is at www.reclaiminitiative.org