My first live porcupine, that is.  I have seen a dead one in the road before, and have promised my kids that next time we come across a dead porcupine I’m going to bundle it into the car and take it home to extract some of its spines - which were used by Indians and white settlers to decorate clothing. Tom and Rachel disparaged this idea vigorously. They know that my crafts projects are rather like other people’s UFOs.

Anyhow, I did at last see a porcupine, poised along the road in Hartsville, MA, where I had stopped en route to dinner with Bill McNeill. And why was I there? To check the progress of the elderflowers along one of the dirt roads because we have run out of the elderflower cordial I generally keep a supply of. (Fortunately, my food-related projects are both more likely to come to fruition and get far more encouragement from family and friends.) He or she stood for a bit by the edge of the road, looking at me quite contemptuously, while I snapped this fuzzy photo.

Multimedia message, originally uploaded by KarenChristensen.

I wasn’t exaggerating in what I wrote about Arthur Morgan a few days ago. He was an astonishingly creative thinker, with a breadth of accomplishment that I cannot help falling for (in authors as well as real life). And didn’t he know it, too. This book, published in Yellow Springs, Ohio, is called The Community of the Future, and the Future of Community.

I’m finishing up my notes for the panel this morning on “The Power of the Right Community,” in a hotel room above a lake at a Disney resort in Florida. A rather odd location, but perhaps evidence that community is truly a universal topic–one that applies in every aspect of life and work. It’s an amazing three-day program for the 2008 Digital Now and I wish I could stay and learn about all these tools myself–I have never seen such a line-up of practical programming on social media. Here’s the Digital Now 2008 attendees list.

Last year this tree was the talk of the town - maybe even the talk of the southern Berkshires - because the quick-shop gas station next door wanted to expand its parking lot into the land next door. This would have meant moving a rather substantial, though shabby, house, and perhaps no one would have objected strongly to that. But this lovely tree - the largest magnolia I’ve seen in the area - would have been cut down, and to my amazement this prospect really galvanized opposition. Even in January, when blossom was a memory. This isn’t a great photo but I hope it suggests how generally seedy that strip of Main Street is, and how very much it is beautified (almost beatified, in fact) by the billows of pink petals. The New England magnolia is generally pink, with smaller blossom than those gorgeous big southern trees with the huge creamy flowers. Last week I saw a tiny magnolia on south Main Street that had blossoms so pink and sharply edged that it looked as though someone had tied pink ribbons to the branches.

We’re in the midst of lots of content delivery and everyone is moving graphics files hither and thither (once we find the damned things). I decided to try a platform called Pando, a kind of at-home FTP service. Here’s what I just wrote to the company:

I was happy to try your product, and liked the performance on the file I transferred. But it messed with Outlook (what’s with searching my contacts list?) and didn’t accept my edits to preferences–I wanted to have it there when I wanted it, not in my face all the time. So, regretfully, I have uninstalled. And I’ve warned off the friends I’d been recommending it to!

One question: were they just being honest, in that I got a warning message every couple minutes that a program was trying to search my Outlook contacts, where other companies put it in the licensing agreement and do it without check? Surely that must be how LinkedIn and Facebook can recommend people I might know. But why a company offering file transfer services would be searching my contacts is another question.

I got the cover today for the new US printing of the Armchair Environmentalist. While I’m not exactly an armchair type and the title wasn’t my idea, I’ve come to like it. I have always wanted to be encouraging and not preachy about going green. Making people feel guilty isn’t very effective, and in any case I wouldn’t be much good as a moral crusader. I think about this a lot now, as Earth Day dawns tomorrow and it seems that almost everyone is ready to get on the climate change bandwagon, in words if not in deeds.

In addition to extensive magazine coverage related to Earth Day, the New York Times had an education supplement yesterday with a long story about the looming closure of Antioch College, “barring any last-minute rescue, soon after next Saturday’s commencement the 156-year-old campus in Yellow Springs, Ohio, will be emptied of students, faculty and staff, lose its accreditation and cease operations for at least a few years.”

I read wondering if they would mention the college’s earlier troubles and its rescue by Arthur Morgan, the iconoclast engineer who later created the Tennessee Valley Authority. I’ve written about Morgan a couple of times and find him tremendously interesting, and far less well-known as he ought to be. He ought to be well-known in part because he is a perfect reminder of how a person can squander his potential and talent, and of how complicated it is to lead social change movements—something else that was unquestionably part of Morgan’s effort in life. But his inability to compromise, and his ego, meant that even with remarkable and well-timed ideas he floundered, and failed to lead. “Morgan, who aimed at more than educational reform, saw his efforts at Antioch as the beginning of the moral regeneration of America.”

A little evidence of the weakness of Wikipedia: compare the article below with the stub in Wikipedia. The problem isn’t just paucity of information, but the lack of coherence, and analysis. And that’s not something that an anonymous, multi-authored work is simply unable to create, so there’s always going to be a lack of answers to the important questions: How? and Why?

By the way, the adult-education campuses mentioned in the New York Times article had a number of faculty members whom I came to know through work on the Encyclopedia of Leadership, so even though I’ve never visited Yellow Springs, Ohio, this closure touches Berkshire’s work in a number of ways.

Morgan, Arthur E.

(1878<N>1975) , American engineer, college president, and social reformer

Arthur E. Morgan was a dynamic and controversial leader in flood control, rural development, and community planning, and saw himself as an innovative social engineer. Widely known as a writer on education and social issues, he served as the first chairman of the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a public works project initiated during the presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. Morgan founded towns and intentional communities, wrote prolifically, and started a small organization called Community Service Inc., which is still based at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where Morgan served, during a contentious but financially successful decade, as president. He is still considered by many an inspiring leader and moral reformer, but the story of his life also demonstrates the risks of imposing a moral vision on others. Read more »

Read yesterday’s post for the background on this gorgeous snap of the BAO boys!

Some people love blogs, other people hate ‘em. As always, I am somewhere in the middle. At least I know what they are. When I saw an entry called “Blogs” in the article list for Berkshire’s 2005 Encyclopedia of Human-Computer Interaction, I said, “What’s a blog?” Trust me, no one let’s me forget that question. Nor do we forget Tom’s comment when I said I was going to start a blog back in 2004. “Oh, Mom,” he said, “blogs are sooo 2002.”

In Scottsdale I was asked about plans for more social networking at our website, and I said I was nervous about starting certain things because I wasn’t sure just how fast they might multiply and how many challenges they might throw up when we’re in the midst of finishing a couple of time-sensitive publications. But in the course of talking to friends afterwards about the group blogs project, I realized that I’d got almost everything in place for expanding our China-related blogs and that they, like the books, are time-sensitive. So I’m working today on getting all the pieces together–I’ll overcome my fears and press that Send button.

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I was at a meeting in New York not long ago with a friend and colleague whose English name is Bob Nylen. That is, his only name at that point was Bob Nylen. But after the meeting our Chinese friend, with whom we had had an animated discussion of why Chinese people adopt English names (my favorite is that of a professor in Beijing: Tiger Wood, singular) and how when one does business in China one needs a Chinese name, decided to christen Bob 包乃能 or Bao Nai-Leng.

BAO Nai-Leng means “guaranteed capable,” he explained, “Bao 包 is also the last name of one of China’s most famous judges in the Song dynasty (600 AC).” Bob emailed yesterday that he had broken a leg, so we decided to send him a BAO bear. 乃能 BAO Nai-Leng, 祝您早日康复!Get well soon!

P.S. Bob says that almost every detail in this Publishers Weekly article about his forthcoming book is wrong, but I do know that if its title is indeed, as rumored, going to be Guts, that’ll be true.

Events in China, and America’s response, have a direct impact on all our lives. The second CHINA Town Hall on Thursday, 17 April 2008, is organized by the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations. China Town Hall is a national day of programming designed to provide Americans in up to 40 cities with the opportunity to talk directly to experts, after a telecast presentation from Washington DC. The nationwide talk will be given by political analyst Norman J. Ornstein of the American Enterprise Institute, and will be followed by presentations by on-site China specialists who will address topics and answer questions related to issues of particular interest to the local community. Each program is cosponsored by the National Committee and a local organization. This is a unique opportunity, and available in many places throughout the United States, including Phoenix (where I am now), and in a few Asian cities, too. But not in Great Barrington, Massachusetts, pop. 7700. Maybe next year.

Enlightening interview about recent events in Tibet here at Fox News “Happy Hour.” Seriously.