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 [...]

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 [...]

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, [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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 [...]

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. [...]

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 [...]