I was back at the Salton Sea a few weeks ago and was stunned to see how quickly it’s drying up. Experts say the water level is currently dropping about seven inches per year. It may not seem like much, but it means the shoreline is receding fast, especially along the north and south shores.

The photos above were taken five years apart, almost to the day. As you can see in the bottom image, the water line has moved quite a distance in that short period of time. Elsewhere along the shore, homes that used to be on the lakefront are now hundreds of feet away from the water.

To say that the Salton Sea is an ecological problem would be an understatement. It’s more like a catastrophe. Dwindling inflows and rising salinity represent a very serious public health problem facing southern California. We’re also looking at the loss of one of North America’s most important migratory bird refuges.

The Salton Sea has been neglected for years, but the Obama administration recently earmarked $200,000 to study the situation and come up with a series of restoration proposals. It’s not much, but it’s a start. It means that perhaps there is enough political will to halt, if not exactly reverse, the process of environmental devastation.

I’ve been documenting the decline of the Salton Sea for several years now. I’ve gathered a collection of thirty photographs in a series titled “Vanishing Oasis.” You can view the images here.

ignite.me, a blog devoted to “art and forward-thinking ideas,” has just posted an interview with me in which I talk about photography, Burning Man, and my own creative process. I also share some thoughts on the profession of journalism, the art of dialogue, and the difference between crafting words and making images.

How do you take a wild and outrageously beautiful experience and translate that to a two-dimensional image? Scott London has done just that in his photographs of the incandescent saturnalia known as Burning Man. The Ignite.me team had the opportunity to interview Scott to learn more about his creative process, his vision and the philosophy that drives his innovative spirit.

Read the full interview here: Artist Interview with Scott London.

(Photo by Karen Kuehn)

Winter is not over yet, at least not for those in the Midwest and Northeast. I’m in West Virginia wrapping up a ten-day road trip. A winter storm has pummeled the region over the last 24 hours. The locals here are used to snow, but it’s clearly an event all the same, especially this late in the season. Here’s an image of the Oglebay area, high above Wheeling, all covered in white.

It’s not Cannes or Sundance, but over the last three decades the Santa Barbara International Film Festival has established itself as one of America’s leading movie fests. The event typically draws about 70,000 people and features some 200 screenings, along with an impressive line-up of tributes, award shows, and panels with industry insiders.

But the big story each year revolves around the celebrities—the beautiful people who come to town and, for a few days, transform the place into the epicenter of the entertainment world. Given Santa Barbara’s proximity and deep ties to Hollywood, as well as the festival’s serendipitous timing—right in the middle of awards season—it’s no surprise the event has become a crucial stop on the Oscar trail.

The festival announces its line-up of awards and tributes in early January, before the annual Oscar nominations are revealed. The organizers have proven to be surprisingly prescient in recent years, often booking appearances with actors, directors and others in the industry who go on to be nominated for Academy Awards. In 2009, for example, the festival welcomed more than two dozen Oscar nominees.

But the festival’s knack for predicting winners can be attributed in no small part to the Hollywood publicity machine. Today celebrities and industry insiders routinely go on “Oscar tours” to generate buzz for their latest films, often backed by million-dollar advertising budgets. For Academy Award-contenders, an appearance in Santa Barbara can not only generate valuable publicity but improve the odds of a big win at the Oscars.

But it’s movie aficionados who are the big winners at the Santa Barbara Film Festival. For what could be better in the end than eleven full days of screenings, panels with prominent writers, producers, and directors, and tributes to the best and brightest in the business?

It was my fifth year covering the festival. I’ve posted a photoessay here.

As I note in my piece, collaborative efforts tend to be loosely structured, highly adaptive, and inherently creative. As a form of joint decision-making and collective action, they represent one of the most promising ways that individuals, groups and organizations can work together for change because, unlike mere cooperation, they are based on advancing collectively-defined goals.

On Collaboration was edited by Marie Bak Mortensen and Judith Nesbitt and published this month by Tate, London.

The basic principle also applies to ideas. Sometimes the best way to introduce a new concept is to marry it to one that is already firmly established. The early scientists understood this when they depicted the atom as a microscopic solar system, or when the early web developers pitched the Internet as an “information superhighway.” A concept that is fuzzy or abstract often has a better chance of flourishing if combined with one that is already well-rooted.

What’s interesting to note is that grafting, as it was traditionally defined, meant “the healing in common of wounds.” It referred to the process by which the old and the new rub against each other. It was always a time-consuming and painful thing. But if a healing took place, common suffering could become the basis for a powerful and mutually sustaining bond.

The winner of the 2012 Nobel Peace Prize will be announced on Friday, October 12th. Speculation about who will win is heating up, as it does every year at this time. But the field seems to be wide open this time around, without any clear favorites or front-runners.

There were 231 nominations this year, according to the Norwegian Nobel Committee, of which 42 are organizations. The nominees are kept secret, but that doesn’t stop nominators from going public with their choices.

We know from news reports and press releases that various heads of state have been nominated, for example, among them President Bill Clinton, former Chancellor of Germany Helmut Kohl, and former Italian prime minister, Giulio Andreotti.

What is less widely known is that these nominations don’t carry any real weight since they could be made by anyone qualified to nominate. In the end, the decision will be made behind closed doors by a five-member committee elected by the Norwegian parliament. What they will decide is anyone’s guess.

Among the other nominees this year are Russian human rights activist Svetlana Gannushkina and Memorial, the organization she founded working to document historical injustice and violence. This is the third year in a row that Gannushkina has been tipped as a strong contender for the Peace Prize and it would be well-deserved.

Also nominated are Ekho Moskvy (Echo of Moscow), a radio station, and its chief editor, Aleksei Venediktov. Echo of Moscow has been an important source of independent news and reporting at a time when the Russian government has been cracking down on the free press. (Aleksei Venediktov was profiled in an excellent piece in the New Yorker some years ago.)

A prize to either Memorial or Ekho Moskvy would be well-deserved — and noteworthy too, because in the 111-year history of the Nobel Peace Prize no award has ever been given to a journalist or news organization (with the possible exception of the 1935 prize to Carl Von Ossietzky).

In recent years, the Nobel Committee has significantly broadened the scope of what it considers peace work by giving awards to social entrepreneurs and environmentalists, among others. While it has been criticized for deviating from Nobel’s original intentions for the Peace Prize — a subject I explore at some length in this review, and elsewhere — I think the Norwegian committee is right in acknowledging that there are many pathways to peace and fraternity among nations.

My personal preference among recent nominees is the noted peace scholar and researcher Gene Sharp. He is perhaps the world’s leading expert on nonviolent revolution and has been described as the “Machiavelli of nonviolence.” His work, which combines historical analysis and political theory, shows that nonviolent grassroots action — of the kind that we have seen in many parts of the Arab world over the last year or two — can be a peaceful means of creating political change.

A Nobel Peace Prize to Gene Sharp would be the first of its kind to a scholar and researcher working for peace.

This year, Sharp was the recipient of the Right Livelihood Award, also known as the “Alternative Nobel Prize.” That award was created in 1980 by Swedish journalist and philanthropist Jakob Von Uexkull and represents what many regard as a more grassroots peace prize for our times — one given to the kind of activists working for social and political change from the ground up, often in remote parts of the world, far from the media spotlight.

I met Jakob Von Uexkull some years ago to talk about the prize he created. He told me that when he created the prize, he never expected to give it to those also being considered for the Nobel Peace Prize. But when the Norwegian Nobel Committee awarded its prize to Kenyan environmentalist Wangari Maathai in 2004 — someone who had received the Right Livelihood Award 20 years earlier — it was as if Von Uexkull’s prize had come of age in a very real sense.

If Gene Sharp were to win the Nobel Peace Prize in 2012, after already winning the Right Livelihood Award earlier this year, it would be a richly-deserved grand slam.

*

See also:

• More of my writings on the Nobel Peace Prize
• A radio interview in which I talk with Jakob Von Uexkull about the Right Livelihood Award

I’m back from an enchanting week at Burning Man 2012. It was a year of wind and dust and even some rain, which made for some interesting photography but was physically quite challenging. I took almost 3,000 pictures over the course of 8 days.

This year I shot on assignment for Rolling Stone. You can view 25 of my images here: “Burning Man 2012: Magic Mushrooms, Nude Dancers, Wild Infernos and More.” You’ll find two additional sets as well: “More Scenes from Burning Man 2012,” and “Faces of Burning Man 2012.”

I’m now busy putting together my customary set of 100 photos from the event. I hope to have that up very soon. (See below.)

In the meantime, my photography has appeared in a number of recent publications:

• The October issue of Outside Magazine features a lengthy piece about Burning Man titled, appropriately enough, “Hot Mess.” Written by Brad Wieners, the article includes images from photographers George Post, Steward Harvey, and myself.
• The current issue of Gateway Magazine, the in-flight magazine of China’s largest airline, includes an 8-page spread featuring my work. A photograph of artist David Boyer’s installation “School of Blue Bottle Noses,” which I took in 2009, appears on the cover. You can view the full issue online here (my photos start on page 218).
• The Santa Cruz newspaper Good Times ran a terrific cover story by Elizabeth Limbach recently with photos by Kyer Wiltshire and myself. The piece is called “Beyond Black Rock City” and is available here (the online version doesn’t have all of the images from the print edition, I’m sorry to say).
• The South African magazine One Small Seed has a 7-page spread about Burning Man in its current issue with 10 of my photographs. You can view the story in PDF format here.
• Popular Mechanics ran a feature back in May called “10 Wild Art Cars from Burning Man” using my images. What’s nice about this piece is that they assigned a writer to it who cobbled together interesting and detailed captions about how each art car was built.
• I also have a spread in the current issue of Marie Claire Brazil, but I haven’t managed to get copies of it yet and it doesn’t appear to be available online.

UPDATE (September 11, 2012): My 2012 photos are now online — view the set here.

My interview with Hillman took place in November 1996. His book, The Soul’s Code, had just been published. The Sunday we met it had debuted at the top of the New York Times bestseller list (thanks in large part to an appearance he made on the Oprah Winfrey show). Hillman had authored more than a dozen books on a variety of subjects but this was his first bestseller. When we met, he seemed especially buoyant and good-natured.

Even so, he was a notoriously prickly interview subject, someone who disdained journalists and disliked answering questions. He agreed to an interview, he told me, because he had something important to say in the book. Ideas are like children, he said, “and you should try to get your children into the world if possible, to defend them and help them along.” It isn’t enough “just to write and throw it out into the world — it’s useful to have to put yourself out there a little bit for what you believe.”

The conversation ranged widely. We talked about the shortcomings of conventional psychology, the question of character and destiny, and how to find and follow your calling in life. The best moments came at the end when Hillman riffed on the pursuit of happiness.

The interview aired on National Public Radio stations in the U.S. and on global shortwave, and later found its way into the pages of The Sun magazine. It was subsequently translated into Spanish and Italian and published elsewhere as well.

I still regard it as one of the finest interviews I’ve done. It shattered many ideas I had carried with me for a long time and Hillman’s comments festered in my mind, eventually opening up new vistas of understanding. He seemed to have that effect on people.

You can read the interview in The Sun here. If you pick up a print copy of the magazine, be sure to check out the brilliant personal tribute from Hillman’s friend and writing colleague Michael Ventura as well.

Many participants in the parade took inspiration from the 2012 theme “Fantasy” — like this troupe of wacky performance artists, headed up by Darla Bea Smith (second from right) calling themselves “Better Gnomes in Gardens.”

Covered in bright blue body-paint, Hannah Smith was part of the Epic Hindu Bhakti Shakti Ensemble led by Solstice artist-in-residence Perry Hoffman.

Tatyana Aksenova-Alliano was one of many amazing dancers in the Hip Brazil dance troupe. Their fuchsia feathered headpieces and sexy sequined outfits conjured up images of the Rio Carneval.

Capoeira master Prof Chin led a group of colorfully-painted women warriors.

Panzumo, a high-energy drum and dance ensemble, has long been a favorite part of the Solstice Parade. Here Asia Warren, Lisa Beck and Arielle Christner dance their way up State Street.

All you need to participate is some face-paint and a pair of angel wings.

 Helene Schneider, Santa Barbara’s popular mayor, took part in the parade wearing a fabulous hat.

Panzumo drummer Derrick Curtis.

Hungarian-born artist Pali-X-Mano is known for his eye-popping inflatable sculptures. This year’s creation was a giant 30-foot sea urchin with circus dancers inside. The float barely fit under the tree canopy of State Street.

Drummers Luke Kende and Colin Clark bring up the rear as the parade draws to an end at Alameda Park.

For more of my photos from the Solstice festivities, go to:

• The complete set of photos from Solstice 2012
• Photos from the 2011 Solstice Parade
• Photos from the 2010 Solstice Parade
• Photos from the 2009 Solstice Parade
• Slideshow of prior Solstice Celebrations 2005-2012 on Flickr

Elinor Ostrom was a maverick, someone who challenged conventional wisdom in political science and economics. By awarding her the Nobel Prize in Economics, the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences did something rather remarkable — it acknowledged the need for new models and new ways of thinking in economics. It was a daring choice, and I think a very good one.

She was the first woman to win the economics prize, which is significant. And with the exception of the prize to Amartya Sen (for his work on welfare economics) it was one of the few awards that recognized alternatives to traditional neoclassical economics.

Ostrom showed that the three dominant economic models used for dealing with collective resource management — the tragedy of the commons, the prisoners’s dilemma, and the logic of collective action — were all inadequate. They were not necessarily wrong, but the conditions under which they held were very specific. 

Her research suggested that there were other viable systems for managing shared resources. For example, she looked at Swiss grazing pastures, Japanese forests, and irrigation systems in Spain and the Philippines that are based on sound principles of collective decision-making that are both democratic and empowering to ordinary people.

The subject of her research had long been considered peripheral to the main business of economics. But today, as we face a global recession and a very serious environmental crisis, her work has special resonance. It offers a roadmap for making resource management more democratic, more participatory, more community-based, and above all more responsive to ordinary citizens.

For more on Elinor Ostrom:

• My review of Governing the Commons

The rise of social entrepreneurship reflects a growing sense today that many of the most promising solutions to global problems don’t necessarily depend on charity, government aid, or foundation grants. They come from individuals at the grassroots level willing to bring entrepreneurial thinking to bear on some of our toughest social problems.

No one has done more to put social entrepreneurship on the map than Bill Drayton. In fact, he’s widely credited with having coined the term in the early 1980s. He’s the CEO and founder of Ashoka, a global association of social innovators. Since 1981, the organization has elected some 3,000 leading social entrepreneurs as Ashoka Fellows, providing them with living stipends, professional support, and access to an outstanding global network of peers.

I caught up with him some weeks ago in Oslo, Norway, to talk about the movement he started and how it’s evolving. He told me that we live in a world structured around efficiency and repetition, yet the rate of change today is accelerating to the point where our institutions can no longer adapt fast enough. The only way to respond to the challenges we face is to become an agent of transformation and renewal.

“The biggest problem we have is that people don’t yet see the change that’s going on,” Drayton explained. “Once people understand that we are moving from a world of repetition to a world of change, then the role of the social entrepreneur becomes obvious. You cannot have the problems outrun the solutions when everyone is a changemaker. We become like smart white blood cells. We see a problem and move right to taking care of it.”

You can read the full interview with Drayton here.

For more on this topic, also check out “Riding the Rapids,” an interview I did some years ago with the late British economist Robert Theobald.

[…]

I studied photography in college and learned some valuable things. But the best education is the one I gained in the field.

I’ve always had doubts about the value of photography school. My sense is that there are better—and cheaper—ways to learn and develop your craft. And today a photography degree no longer brings any guarantees or opens any special doors.

In fact, I’ve been saddened by the many requests I’ve received from photographers with degrees from expensive trade schools who want to intern with me. The time for an internship, it seems to me, is before you enroll in a degree program, not after.

The great Henri Cartier-Bresson once said that you have to take 10,000 images before you find yourself as a photographer. And Malcolm Gladwell, in his book Outliers, says the general consensus is it takes 10,000 hours—about 20 hours a week for 10 years—to develop true mastery in a given field.

Both of these observations hold true whether you’re in school earning a credential or out in the field making pictures. So why not skip the degree?

Most of what you can learn in college, you can also learn just as effectively through books, online courses, and weekend workshops. To say nothing of good mentors.

One more thing. Too many people who go to school think that graduating means they are done with their education. The degree gives them the illusion they know everything they need to know. But we can never stop learning, any more than we can reach the limit of our creative capacities. People who are self-taught seem to understand this intuitively.

My best advice to you is:

1. Volunteer/intern with an established photographer that you like and respect (or simply ask to follow him or her around in the course of a day’s work)
2. Start a clippings file (or folder on the computer) with work that inspires you and blows your mind and then try to recreate some of those images in your own style
3. Share your work with other photographers and solicit constructive feedback (and always take “likes” and other forms of positive feedback on social networks like Facebook and Flickr with a grain of salt)
4. Spend time every day shooting for no other purpose than to have fun and experiment

In just two years, it’s established itself as the biggest of its kind in Scandinavia, a coming together of business leaders, foundation executives, government officials, grassroots activists, and social innovators of all kinds.

Among the highlights for me was getting to spend time with some of my longtime heroes, such as Ashoka founder Bill Drayton (the man widely credited with having invented the concept of social entrepreneurship), and Irish peace activist Mairead Maguire, winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize.

Video from the event was streamed live and you can view the complete footage in the Partnership for Change media archive.

Here are some photos from the event:

Oslo’s remarkable Opera House, site of the 2012 Partnership for Change conference.

I always love mingling with great people between the sessions.

As emcee, I presented the speakers in the general sessions and tried to keep things moving along smoothly.

A view from the main stage of the Opera House.

I’ve always felt that the best emcee is the one you can’t remember when the event is over.

Here I talk with Jonas Borgchgrevink, a young Norwegian entrepreneur, about his start-up MyGoodAct.com. (You can watch this on YouTube.)

Sitting down with Mairead Maguire, winner of the 1976 Nobel Peace Prize, after one of the panels.

A panel discussion with Bay Fang, Marcus Bleasdale, and Kathrine Aspaas on “The Changing Role of the Media.”

]]> http://www.scottlondon.com/blog/archives/528/feed 0 http://www.scottlondon.com/blog/archives/521 http://www.scottlondon.com/blog/archives/521#comments Mon, 05 Mar 2012 08:15:56 +0000 Scott London http://www.scottlondon.com/blog/?p=521 It’s been exactly 50 years since the publication of Thomas S. Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, a slim little book that introduced the word “paradigm” into common parlance and shattered our conventional way of looking at change. After half a century, it still represents perhaps the best thinking on how transformation happens, who drives it, why it’s so vehemently resisted, and what it really asks of people.

The book explores the psychology of belief that governs the acceptance of new concepts and innovations in science. Kuhn showed that the history of science is not one of linear, rational progress moving toward ever more accurate and complete knowledge of an objective reality. Rather, it’s one of radical shifts of vision in which a multitude of nonrational and nonempirical factors come into play.

Kuhn showed that the theories of Copernicus, Newton, and Einstein were all self-contained and “incommensurable” with one another. There was no steady accumulation of truth in the form of objective knowledge about the physical universe. Instead each theory was a revolutionary break from the previous theory, resulting in the arbitrary replacement of one conceptual matrix, or worldview, by another. Once the matrix changed, the way science was done and applied was fundamentally different.

Kuhn used the word “paradigm” to describe this conceptual matrix. A paradigm, in his formulation, is a constellation of facts, theories, methods, and assumptions about reality that allows researchers to isolate data, elaborate theories, and solve problems. Aristotle’s “Physica,” Ptolemy’s “Almagest,” Newton’s “Principia” and Lavoisier’s “Chemistry” are examples of scientific classics that gave rise to new paradigms. Each of these works triggered a revolution, rendering irrelevant much of what came before them. The chief characteristic of a paradigm, Kuhn argued, is that it has its own set of rules and illuminates its own set of facts. Because it is self-validating, it tends to be resistant to change.

Kuhn pointed out that as long as a paradigm is successful at explaining observed phenomena and solving problems, it remains dominant. But as new phenomena begin to contradict it, the paradigm succumbs to increasing doubt. And as anomalies multiply, it is thrown into crisis. At this stage, what is needed is the articulation of a radically new theory or insight, such as Einstein’s theory of relativity, that can explain the apparent contradictions. In this way, long periods of “normal” science are followed by brief intellectual upheavals that reorder the basic theoretical assumptions of the field.

New paradigms rarely appear on the scene full-blown. Their early formulations are typically crude and incomplete. They are often the products not of deliberation or interpretation, but of “a relatively sudden and unstructured event like the gestalt switch,” Kuhn wrote. “Scientists then often speak of the ’scales falling from the eyes’ or of the ‘lightening flash’ that inundates a previously obscure puzzle, enabling its components to be seen in a new way that for the first time permits its solution.”

New paradigms are never immediately accepted by the scientific community. They may gain ground because of some dramatic and unforseen verification, or for personal or aesthetic reasons — they may appear “neater,” “simpler,” or “more elegant” than their older counterparts. But the choice between competing paradigms ultimately comes down to personal conviction since, as he put it, “the competition between paradigms is not the sort of battle that can be resolved by proofs.” While the new paradigm tends to be more successful in accounting for and predicting phenomena, there is ultimately no absolute standard for determining whether one paradigm is better than another.

Kuhn stressed that a new paradigm is almost always the work of a young person or someone new to the field. After a number of years in a certain discipline, a scientist tends to be too emotionally and habitually invested in the prevailing paradigm. Indeed, the established leaders of the older tradition may never accept the new view of reality. As Kuhn wrote, “Copernicanism made few converts for almost a century after Copernicus death. Newton’s work was not generally accepted, particularly on the Continent, for more than half a century after the ‘Principia’ appeared. Priestley never accepted the oxygen theory, nor Lord Kelvin the electromagnetic theory, and so on.” Adherents to the old paradigm usually go to their graves with their faith unshaken, Kuhn wryly noted. Even when confronted with overwhelming evidence, they stubbornly stick with the wrong but familiar.

The fact that Kuhn’s treatise — an academic essay on a fairly specialized subject, the psychological factors at work in the advancement of science — went on to win a wide audience is one of the great surprise stories in the history of ideas. But Kuhn had put his finger on something that was widely intuited, if not openly acknowledged or articulated, namely that change proceeds by upheaval. It’s not a smooth and gradual process. Transformations are violent because they necessitate the destruction and reordering of our most basic conceptual frameworks. That was an insight even a general readership was happy to embrace.

Not all of Kuhn’s conclusions have stood the test of time. For example, recent work has called into question the idea that scientific paradigms are “incommensurable” and that paradigm shifts are therefore essentially irrational events. For example, Canadian philosopher Paul Thagard says there is enough continuity in scientific revolutions to suggest that the process is not really arbitrary or non-linear. He likens a paradigm-shift to the process of learning a second language. (Read my review of Thagard’s book here)

But never mind. Kuhn’s basic insights stand and his service to our understanding of the psychology of change has been incalculable. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions was described by Scientific American’s John Horgan as “the most influential treatise ever written on how science … proceeds.” Philosopher Richard Rorty called it “the most influential English-language philosophy book of the last half-century. It sold the most copies, made the greatest difference to our ways of thinking, and was the subject of the most intense and complex debates.” “For a quarter of a century,” Huston Smith wrote in 1982, it was “the most cited book on college campuses and … turned ‘paradigm’ into a household word.” The book, in other words, is an evergreen.