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.