Just returned from the 2007 Burning Man festival. It was a beautiful and exhilarating week. This year I shot some 1,700 photos. Some of them were lost, and I’m still grieving about that, but there was enough for a photoessay, one that offers at least a small glimpe of the extraordinary art, the beautiful faces, and the brilliant colors of Black Rock City.

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The site topped four million hits in August — a new record. The spike can be partly explained by the popularity of my photos from the Burning Man festival. The response has been tremendous. A nod from MetaFilter, the Net’s premier “Best of the Web” site, along with links from some fifty-plus blogs, has brought a surge of visitors.

Another factor is the growth of Google Scholar which has generated a lot of traffic from college and university campuses. Professors who used to hand out “readers” — bound collections of photocopied articles and book chapters — now just point their students to a page full of links. Google Scholar makes the professor’s job that much easier by tracking down quality information on practically any subject under the sun. Gone are the days when academic research actually involved a trip to the library.

And then there is Wikipedia, the world’s favorite encyclopedia, which is growing by leaps and bounds and now has quite a few links to pages on this site.

My photographs from Burning Man appear in several magazines currently on the newsstand. The new issue of Nevada Magazine includes a ten-page cover story titled “Images of Burning Man” with many of my photos. The latest Public Art Review features an article by Louis Brill titled “Burning Man Photographers.” The piece showcases the work of several photographers and makes the point that while public art is often the subject of Burning Man photos, some images from the event deserve to be called art in their own right. In addition, the French magazine Néosapiens includes a full-page photo of mine from the 2004 festival. Finally, the glossy German travel magazine ADAC Reisemagazin featured a pictorial on Burning Man a few months ago in a special issue on the American west. Sierra Magazine will also publish a photo of mine from last year’s festival in their upcoming issue.

I Madonnari was the name given to street painters in 16th- and 17th-century Italy, itinerant artists who traveled from town to town and city to city rendering images of the Madonna on sidewalks and in public squares. Like street musicians, the “Madonna painters” supported themselves by small donations — usually coins thrown to them by appreciative passers-by and festival-goers. Using chalks and handmade pastels, the artists sometimes created works of remarkable majesty and scale. But the art was always ephemeral, vanishing with the first rain.

Today, the tradition of street painting lives on in cities across Europe and in a growing number of communities in North America. This year marked the 20th anniversary of the I Madonnari Festival in Santa Barbara, California. When it started in 1987, it was the only street painting event of its kind in the United States. It is held each Memorial Day weekend in the plaza in front of Santa Barbara’s historic mission. The three-day event typically attracts some 25,000 visitors. The art ranges from small chalk drawings by local artists to large-scale street murals by nationally recognized street painters. There is also a special chalk-drawing area for young artists.

I Madonnari is a fundraiser for the Children’s Creative Project, an innovative program that provides visual and performing arts education to public schools in and around Santa Barbara. At a time when arts education has been all but eliminated from school budgets, entrepreneurial communities have to take matters into their own hands. The I Madonnari Festival represents one of the more successful such initiatives —

a community-building effort aimed at both making art and ensuring its survival in the local school system.

View my photoessay here.

It’s a place of uncommon natural beauty, an inland oasis teeming with wildlife surrounded by unrelenting desert. But things are not quite what they seem at the Salton Sea. The lake is shrinking. The fish are dying. The birds are ailing. And the once-thriving communities along the shore are mostly abandoned. The Salton Sea is an ecological catastrophe just waiting to happen. This photoessay looks at the stark beauty of the place while at the same time documenting some of the effects of environmental decline and devastation.

As part of a book project I’m involved with, I was asked to submit a list of five great books — personal favorites that, for better or worse, have challenged and inspired my work, perhaps shaped my way of seeing the world. It was an fun assignment, but also an impossible task. For every book that deserved a place on the list, ten others recommended themselves. I asked myself whether any list could be complete without Blake or Rilke? Without Nietzsche or Schopenhauer? Where did Hamlet fit in? Or The Grand Inquisitor? Or the essays of George Orwell? Okay, I thought, how about something simple and straightforward, like an informal list, in no particular order, of books I keep by the bed — works that nourish my meditations and inspire me when cupboard of ideas is bare. These are the five I came up with…

Aldous Huxley: The Perennial Philosophy

In this classic anthology published in 1945, Huxley suggests that there is an identifiable transcendent unity at the core of the enduring wisdom traditions — a common vision as to the nature of ultimate reality, knowledge, ethics, and spiritual life — despite the great surface variety of doctrines, practices, and cultures. He refers to it as the “perennial philosophy,” saying that the outlook is common to people everywhere and at all times, with the notable exception of the modern West. Using excerpts from classic spiritual texts, mystical writings, visionary poetry, and other sources, Huxley sketches the broad outlines of this philosophy with penetrating insight and originality. A sublime collection.

Paramahansa Yogananda: The Autobiography of a Yogi

This spiritual classic is not only absorbing and beautifully written, it is as inspiring and relevant today as it must have been when it appeared in 1946. The book is a chronicle of the life of one of India’s most revered spiritual teachers, beginning with tales from his unusual childhood, accounts of his meetings with saints and sages, a description of his rigorous course of study with his guru, and a chronicle of his subsequent travels to the West to live and teach. Yogananda casts a light not only his own spiritual evolution but also his relationship to the religious traditions of the West, such as the teachings of Jesus, offering a probing look at the ultimate mysteries of human existence. (An unabridged audio version of the book, brilliantly read by actor Ben Kingsley, was released in 1997.)

Lewis Mumford: The Transformations of Man

The Transformations of Man is 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. The book appeared in 1956, about a decade before the human potential movement hit its stride. Mumford was among the first philosophers to propose that “if life, in its fullness and wholeness, is to furnish our criterion for all development, then our philosophy must respect … above all, the tendency to self-actualization and self-transcendence.” He also made a forceful case for the cultivation of our capacity as human beings to love: “Without a positive concentration upon love in all its phases, we can hardly hope to rescue the earth and all the creatures that inhabit it from the insensate forces of hate, violence, and destruction that now threaten it.”
Richard Tarnas: The Passion of the Western Mind

In this sweeping intellectual history published in 1991, Richard Tarnas surveys the evolution of Western thought from ancient Greece to the Renaissance, from the scientific revolution to the dawn of the 21st century, illuminating the pivotal ideas in philosophy, religion, and science that have forged our unique cultural outlook. He also reflects on our curious postmodern predicament at the end of the millennium. Today, he says, we find ourselves wandering disconsolately between two worlds — one dying and the other struggling to be born. On the one hand, the spiritual and intellectual certainties of the past no longer command our allegiance. On the other, the promises of a more integral worldview, a cosmology of tomorrow — one based on a deeper relationship with nature and with the larger cosmos — require of us a leap of faith few are as yet willing to take. With the future of the human spirit and the future of the planet hanging in the balance, he says we have no choice but to embrace courage, imagination, and our deepest inner resources.

Theodore Zeldin: An Intimate History of Humanity

Published in 1995, An Intimate History of Humanity is a wide-ranging survey of human feelings and emotions that have helped to shape not only the lives of individuals but the course of entire civilizations. Rather than focus on social, economic, or political history, Theodore Zeldin looks at, among other things, courage, friendship, fear, loneliness, conversation, misunderstanding, frustration, and the yearning to escape. He presents some two dozen chapters that address a variety of themes, including “Why compassion has flowered even in stony ground” and “How travelers are becoming the largest nation in the world, and how they have learned to see only what they are looking for.” Each chapter begins with a biography of a living person, usually based on author interviews. These portraits are then placed against the backdrop of a universal history. The idea, as Zeldin says, is “to look at the facts through two lenses simultaneously, both through a microscope, choosing details that illuminate life in those aspects that touch people most closely, and through a telescope, surveying large problems from a great distance. I hope I can say enough to show that humans have many more options before them than they currently believe.” A beautifully written book and a remarkable achievement.

I’ve posted two new interviews on how technology is remaking our world — for better and for worse. Howard Rheingold, who had staked out a presence on the Net before most of us had a personal computer, let alone a modem and a dial-up connection, talks about the idea of “virtual community” and the true meaning of social networking. Chellis Glendinning, a New Mexico-based psychologist and cultural critic talks about the hidden social and psychological costs of technology and the growing neo-Luddite movement.

The Price of a Dream by David Bornstein is a compelling and well-written account of how Bangladeshi economist Muhammad Yunus started the Grameen Bank out of his own pocket in the 1970s and thereby launched the microcredit movement. Grameen and efforts like it are transforming not only conventional banking practices but also social and economic development programs throughout the world.

Grameen, whose name is derived from the Bangla word for “village,” first began as an experiment operating from special windows in the traditional national banks. In 1983, the bank became an independent entity. Despite predictions from traditional bankers that Grameen’s clients would take the money and run, 97 percent of its loans are repaid — a rate comparable to Chase Manhattan’s. The reason is that the system is based on trust and mutual accountability. To qualify for a loan, a villager must become a member of a five‑person borrowers group. Groups share responsibility for loan repayments — and defaults — so they are typically very careful in choosing new members. Since most villagers have none of the data that bankers traditionally use to decide if a prospective borrower is credit-worthy, they must rely on trust and social pressure. As Bornstein points out, Grameen’s system ensures “that villagers are brought together frequently in a setting where they are forced to answer for their actions before all eyes.”

Villagers can borrow money from the Grameen Bank only if their assets fall below the value of a half acre of land. Since this range includes half the population of Bangladesh, Grameen Bank branches usually comprise a cross‑section of villagers: some borrowers are absolutely destitute; some are slightly better off; and some are near the top levels of the eligibility criterion. The better‑off villagers usually take larger loans thereby “subsidizing” the poorer ones. This allows Grameen to sustain itself and continue to reach more poor people.

As Bornstein makes clear, the Grameen philosophy represents a radical departure from the traditional idea of banking. By working in villages and small towns rather than cities, lending mostly to women rather than men, and promoting self-employment rather than wage-employment, as well as creating programs and workshops aimed at redressing a wide range of social problems in the countryside, the bank has effectively redefined credit from a privilege reserved for a few fortunate people to a tool by which millions of poor villagers can improve their lives.

Oddly enough, Bornstein says, the Grameen Bank represents a new twist on supply-side economics. It is founded on the idea not of   “trickle-down” prosperity but rather the “bubble-up” effect. While supply-side economics is based on the idea of injecting capital into the economy from the top down — at the level of corporate investors, in the form of tax cuts and special incentives — the Grameen approach is to inject it at ground level in the form of loans to the poor. In the long run the effects benefit everyone, including the wealthy, because as small-business people improve their social standing they eventually reach a point where they have more spending power. This ultimately translates into greater consumer demand for such items as soap, toothpaste and clothing, thereby stimulating the overall economy.

Today the Grameen Bank has become a leader of the so-called microlending movement. The model has been replicated in Malaysia, the Philippines, Malawi, and many parts of Africa. Hundreds of programs have also cropped up in Canada and the United States. Their systems vary according to context and culture, Bornstein notes, but their objectives are the same. “Like Grameen, they view poor people as clients, not beneficiaries, and they seek to provide them with the means to support themselves through dignified self-employment.”