Paradise or Oblivion details the root causes of the systemic value disorders and detrimental symptoms caused by our current established system. This video presentation advocates a new socio-economic system, which is updated to present-day knowledge, featuring the life-long work of Social Engineer, Futurist, Inventor and Industrial Designer Jacque Fresco, which he calls a Resource-Based Economy.

The film details the need to outgrow the dated and inefficient methods of politics, law, business, or any other “establishment” notions of human affairs, and use the methods of science, combined with high technology, to provide for the needs of all the world’s people. It is not based on the opinions of the political and financial elite or on illusionary so-called democracies, but on maintaining a dynamic equilibrium with the planet that could ultimately provide abundance for all people.

Paradise or Oblivion, by The Venus Project, introduces the viewer to a more appropriate value system that would be required to enable this caring and holistic approach to benefit human civilization. This alternative surpasses the need for a monetary-based, controlled, and scarcity-oriented environment, which we find ourselves in today.

*This is NOT the “major motion picture” that The Venus Project is working towards but rather is a 52 min. documentary to introduce the aims and proposals to new people. Paradise or Oblivion will be released in March 2012 and we will post a link to the documentary as soon as it is released.

In the meantime, if you are not familiar with the work of Jacque Fresco and his Venus Project, here is a link to his highly informative newsletter and The Venue Project site. Fresco is one of the most brilliant minds of our time and his visionary proposals make total sense. He just raised funds to hire a screenwriter to develop a feature film that can inform the world that a solution exists to humanity’s challenges. This film cannot arrive too soon. Like Buckminster Fuller before him, the world is fortunate to have his brilliant mind and heart in service to life. NPD will continue to update readers on Jacque’s progress as it means our progress.

John Fullerton is Founder and President of Capital Institute, a transdisciplinary collaborative space dedicated to exploring and effecting economic change. The Institute’s mission is to help create “a more just, resilient, and sustainable way of living on this earth through the transformation of finance.”

In our candid interview with John, he shared his own transformative journey that lead him from Wall Street, where he managed capital markets worldwide at JP Morgan, to establishing himself as a thought leader in the “new economy” space.

In this 5 minute clip, John speaks soberly yet with optimism about the immense challenge of our time: the biospheric reality that is forcing us to re-think economics as we have known it, which is as John states “essentially our religion today.”

Watch, listen, comment and share!

John Fullerton: The Biospheric Reality from Katie Teague on Vimeo.

And here is another clip with David Korten, author of When Corporations Rule and Agenda for a New Economy.

David Korten: Walking Away From the King from Katie Teague on Vimeo.

Here is the trailer for the wonderful film these clips are taken from.

Money & Life trailer from Katie Teague on Vimeo.

The producer and director of Money & Life, Katie Teague, is seeking $50,000 to complete this important documentary that demystifies and questions the broken institution of money. No small undertaking. The heart of her message is that debt creates scarcity and her film is an empowering wake up call to end the vicious cycle and liberate us and money from its capitalist constraints so we can celebrate abundance instead and co-create a system that serves people and the planet. And, as you can see, through her interviews, she is touching on the soul of the issue with intelligence and compassion.

“My hope is that we can create an economy where we can do what we love, where we can be rewarded for doing what we love,” Teague said. “It’s idealistic, but it’s only limited by saying it’s impossible. The movie shows that money is a human artifact. It doesn’t grow on trees or fall from the sky. “We created it, and over time it’s changed. We are living in a time of significant shift. Things change and the main institution that needs to change in our lifetimes is money.”

Please join me in helping Katie complete her project.

To read a great story on Katie and her film and ideas, click here.

REMEMBER, TO WATCH THE CLIPS CLICK ON THE YELLOW LINK TO NPD’S WEBSITE.

Before you watch it, you may want to enjoy the interview with Foster conducted by Worldwide Tipping Point. The info on that interview and a link to view the film follow. My sense is that this fiim will do as well or better than the surprise hit What the Bleep a few years back and the great new online film distribution platform it is available on, Play It Forward, offers you the opportunity to enjoy the film and pass it along as a gift to friends you feel would really enjoy it. Please let me know your thoughts once you have viewed it.

After spending 8 years and millions of dollars to create the documentary THRIVE: What on Earth Will It Take? I am honored to have Foster Gamble on Worldwide Tipping Point today in what I believe is his first public interview since the film’s release!

So what is this THRIVE film all about? It will become quickly evident in this interview what THRIVE is hear to say, and I encourage you to check out our dialogue (and the movie) straight away!

Interestingly, Foster Gamble is a direct descendent of the Proctor & Gamble empire and I ask him some pretty pointed questions regarding his unbiased ability to shine a light on the unsustainable nature of our financial systems while obviously coming from a ‘financially elite’ family as described in the film…and his response is fascinating!

THRIVE weaves all sorts of topics, including tangible evidence of extraterrestrial life, the meaning of crop circles, and the possibility of unlimited sources of clean, non-combustible energy being accessible right now…a truth that would completely revolutionize the way human beings live on Planet Earth!

I ask Foster about his decision to include all these seemingly unrelated topics, and how this all relates to a world where we can all thrive. Again, his answers are fascinating.

In the end I find THRIVE to be a timely and relevant film, and a critically important artifact for our times. While I don’t expect all of you to agree with everything in the movie (as I am sure it will be controversial), I believe it is worth checking out and listening to our interview because THRIVE’s perspective certainly provides a few important things to consider.

In the end, it is up to ALL of us to decide how we can reach the Tipping Point and thrive together in our world…and I am looking forward to all your feedback!

Click here to screen the film and pass it along.

Here is what I wrote the first time I set eyes on her extraordinary work: “Colette’s magnificent limited edition of GATEWAYS OF THE DIVINE: An Illuminated Manuscript for the Modern Age is a catalytic portal into the shadow world. During the course of a decade, Colette underwent her own intense initiation and deep process, and through this has emerged a work of art that is both compelling and a powerful transformational tool.”
- JEFF HUTNER, Writer and Producer.

To read more about the book and watch a video I shot for her please visit Gateways of the Divine (http://www.gatewaysofthedivine.com). Colette is offering her remaining copies at cost to NPD readers.

From Colette’s Crucible of Chronic Illness

Moving Forward
10 Sep 2011 05:10 PM PDT

Solutio I

And moving forward takes feral courage,
opens the wildest
and most outrageous light of all,

becomes the hardest path of all.
the firm line we drew in the sand
becomes the river we will not cross.

But the river of the soul flows on
and the soul
refuses safety until it finds the sea.

The ocean of longing,
the sea of your deeper want,
the gravity well of your own desire,

the place you would fall becomes
in falling
the place you are held.

-DAVID WHYTE
from “Millennium”

“I don’t know if I should write or scream,” I confess to my sister Carolyn at the end of June. For a month now my body has been riddled with angry, itchy hives, my entire immune system inflamed and overwhelmed, my nights turbulent and devoid of restful sleep. All the symptoms of my chronic health conditions have returned with a blood-sucking vengeance – crippling fatigue, digestive distress, brain fog, a woefully weakened immunity. I am numb with shock, spun out from suffering, unraveled in anguish. I’m outraged, but too stunned to express it. How did I get cast into the Underworld from just one chemical cocktail injected into my veins?

At the end of May, as I complete two months of Hyperbaric Oxygen treatments, I feel as if I am sailing off into the healing sunset. I am feeling vastly improved, with greater stamina and vitality, a stronger immune system, and the sense of hope about the unfolding of my life. I feel a great sense of accomplishment, having worked so hard to raise the money for this treatment course, and an enduring gratitude to all the friends and family whose generous support made it possible. I have also completed a month of IV chelation therapy for heavy metal toxicity, which has been going very well, with few side effects. I only have 4 more weeks of IV treatments to go, and then I will be retested to check if I needed additional treatments. As far as I am concerned, I am in the home stretch.

Just five days after completing the HBOT treatments, however, I have a blind date with destiny in the form of a chemical called DMPS, which I later discover was developed in the post WWII era for acute mercury and industrial chemical poisoning, and gets injected into my sensitive body to remove only moderately elevated levels of mercury. In a few short hours, my veins take in an overwhelming blend of IV DMPS for mercury, IV EDTA for lead, and followed by an injection of glucathione, a potent antioxidant, and then a push of minerals, which burns and aches terribly as it goes into my arm. I leave the clinic feeling weak, unstable, in a state of shock. I come home, collapsing into bed at 5PM. All night I feel as if I have poison coursing through my veins. I feel assaulted, but I tell myself that maybe it’s just the toxic metals clearing from my system.

The next morning, though, I don’t feel anything is clearing out from my body. My digestive system is on strike and I feel increasingly toxic. Then hives start erupting all over my body. Inside and out, my body feels inflamed, my immune and nervous systems on red alert. The next night, I am unable to sleep. Something is very, very wrong. I’m sinking in a cesspool of fire.

Ragged and worried at this point, I go to the computer the following morning to research DMPS, since that was the only drug I’d never been given before in the IV chelation series, and I had been tolerating the IV EDTA treatments well. I find out that DMPS is not an FDA approved drug, and its status is only as a “bulk chemical” that requires an informed patient consent in order to be legally administered. I was not warned of any dangers and side effects, nor given a DMPS consent form to sign. I also find out in my research that chemical chelators are not supposed to be combined in one treatment, and that it is necessary to wait 24 hours before receiving the mineral push, neither of which happened in my case. There are serious risks associated with the use of DMPS, especially with in those with chronic conditions and sensitive constitutions. Dr. Thomas Levy, a cardiologist who co-authored the book Uninformed Consent, says “DMPS is an unqualified sledge hammer to the immune system. Immune declines and clinical illness can result can result for weeks and sometimes even months after only one injection of DMPS.” Even Dietrich Klinghardt, M.D., who is an expert on heavy metal detoxification and is a big proponent of IV chelation therapy himself writes, “More aggressive approaches, such as I.V. Glutathione, Vit.C, DMPS, CaEDTA and others have a place in reasonably healthy people but often worsen the condition in patients with advanced illness.” If I had known any of this beforehand, I certainly wouldn’t have agreed to this treatment.

What was my naturopathic doctor thinking? When she had recommended this IV treatment course to remove toxic metals several months earlier, I had expressed concern about DMPS in particular, because a friend had suffered permanent kidney damage 10 years earlier from IV DMPS. My doctor assured me that the IV specialist had the latest training, and that I was in good hands. End of discussion. No explanation of possible dangers and side effects, nor an informed consent for me to sign. None of the standard preliminary tests were done on me prior to starting the chelation series: blood and urine tests to assess the health of my kidneys, liver, and immune system, hair test to check mineral levels, nor an EKG and chest x ray to see if my heart would be at risk. Hard lesson learned: no matter how much you like and trust your doctor, do the research yourself before agreeing to any drug or treatment course. I know my doctor didn’t intend to hurt me, but that doesn’t excuse the gross negligence in this situation.

“Acceptance is hard. To accept my pain means holding it in my arms, like a package handed to me, my proper burden to be carried. The package may be as heavy as lead, or burning hot, or stuck through with razors, but I must concede that it is my package, simply because it has arrived in my life.

It is not a mistake. It has not been sent by accident to the wrong person. I may not welcome it, but accepting means I can carry it without protest for as long as necessary—and then I lay it down.”

-JEANNE DUPRAU, author, The City of Ember

In the weeks and months that follow, I do everything I can to recover from this nightmare: juice fasting, strict diets, energy healings, and two weeks of additional HBOT treatments to help me get over the worst of the DMPS poisoning. I am now working with a highly skilled and intuitive MD named Catherine Fehrmann who specializes in safe and gentle detoxification, as well as healing areas of infection and trauma in the body. God knows, my body has been through it. I’m now on a regime that includes chlorella tablets and cilantro tincture for the heavy metals, as well as a host of other pills and potions. So far, the treatment is going well. I feel like I’m in good hands.

It’s been more than three months since the DMPS debacle, and unfortunately my immune system continues to feel weakened, with frequent bodily aches and pains, and swollen glands. I have some good days, but my overall energy and stamina are not good. I wonder how long it will take for me to recover fully. I’m considering going back for more Hyperbaric Oxygen treatments, since they are gentle and have had the most positive impact on my health of any course I’ve been on during the past decade.

I’m worn out from what I have been through, but I’m hanging in there. On September 22nd, just 11 days after 9/11, I celebrate the 10th anniversary of the publication of my book, “Gateways of the Divine: An Illuminated Manuscript for the Modern Age.” At another time I will share the amazing and mysterious synchronicities between the events of 9/11 and the Gateways, but for now I will offer one jewel I gleaned from birthing this 7 lb. book: If you follow your healing path completely, and trust the guidance you receive along the way, you will naturally be led to your path of service in the world.

With a feral courage, I’m moving forward…

“Solutio I,” 4×6” collage on paper from The Oracle of Alchemy, ©2006-2011 by Colette de Gagnier. To order prints from this series, please visit Alchemy of the Divine and Colette’s Visionary Art Gallery at www.MysticAlchemyDesign.com

To learn more about Colette’s book, Gateways of the Divine, please go to www.gatewaysofthedivine.com

For more information on the risks and side effects associated with DMPS, please go to http://www.dmpsbackfire.com/dmps/default.shtml

For more information on Hyperbaric Oxygen Therapy, please go to: www.ImproveHealing.com

For more information on the healing work of Dr. Catherine Fehrmann, please go to http://www.catherinefehrmannmd.com

For more information on the writing of Jeanne Du Prau : http://www.jeanneduprau.com/books.shtml

For more information on the offerings of poet David Whyte: www.davidwhyte.com

I watch a lot of environmental documentary films, and it’s usually quite clear whose “side” the filmmaker is on—the same one as me, of course. In one sense, this is perfectly understandable: Powerful people and institutions that trash the environment are more likely to use lobbyists, front groups, and PR wizards, not earnest documentaries, to spread their views. Big Coal, Big Oil, and Big Timber take their agenda straight to the halls of power, not to art houses and film fests.

The unfortunate result is that environmental documentary genre can be ripe for groupthink and complacency, and occasionally I find myself refreshed to see a doc that forces viewers to challenge their own preconceptions and opinions. If a Tree Falls, currently playing in theaters, is one such film. It follows the case of Daniel McGowan, a former Earth Liberation Front (ELF) member who is serving a seven-year sentence on federal terrorism charges for his role in two arsons, one at a logging firm and another at a facility that activists falsely believed was growing genetically engineered trees. No one was injured or killed in the arsons, yet the government pursued this “eco-terrorism” case as vigorously as it goes after Islamic militant cells that have openly stated their murderous intentions.

McGowan gets plenty of screen time, and he comes off as an amiable and articulate nonviolent activist caught up in the draconian anti-terrorism laws of post-9/11 America. But filmmaker Marshall Curry also talks to the owner of the burned-down logging company, the law enforcers who nabbed McGowan, and McGowan’s hard-bitten Irish cop father, who shares few of his son’s radical views. Curry also interviews green activists who became government informants against their peers in order to save their own skins. The end product is a well-rounded portrait that humanizes McGowan without excusing his more extreme actions or painting him as a flawless hero. The notable thing is that the film also humanizes his fellow activists, his parents, and his legal foes, acknowledging that conflicting opinions and emotions come with this complicated territory. Not everything is as clear-cut as the wilderness that McGowan is so committed to saving.

The British environmental magazine The Ecologist has an interview with Marshall Curry that explains a bit about how this remarkable and moving film came together. For starters, he basically happened across his subject: Curry’s wife works at the office where McGowan was arrested.

As Curry tells The Ecologist, “I actually didn’t know anything about the ELF beside very cursory things I’d seen on TV. My wife runs a domestic violence organization in Brooklyn and came home from work one day and told me that four federal agents had walked in to her office and arrested one of her employees. It was Daniel McGowan—I knew him a bit, he was the opposite of someone who’d be facing life in prison for domestic terrorism would look or act like. I was interested and decided to jump in.”

Curry’s fair-mindedness ultimately does a great service to his film, to judge from the reactions he’s gotten. He says, “When you work on something in an edit room with just a couple of other people, you never know how it is going to be received. It was really important to us that it reflect the complexities of the case. We’ve been happy to see that the prosecutor, the detective, and the police captain—they’ve all seen it and feel like it’s an important and accurate story. Similarly, Daniel’s family and the spokesman for the ELF say the same thing.”

Read more

Proving that one person can make a difference, (formerly) twinkie-lovin Texan and successful Wall Street analyst shares the story of one morning’s family breakfast that changed the course of her life, as well as (she hopes) the course of the American food industry. Realizing that her child was allergic to what she had considered safe foods, Robyn O’Brien put her analytical and research skills to work and discovered far more than she’d wanted to about what’s really in the foods we feed our families. This video will have even the hardened skeptics pondering whether their food habits need some tweaking.

Video from KarmaTube

Robyn’s organization, has a gorgeous website packed with inspiring stories, useful information, and easy tips.

Educating yourself, and others, is the first step to motivating change. Call a friend and plan a viewing of the eye-opening documentary, Food Inc.

Even if you’re not ready to go all-out organic, take simple steps to cut toxins from your diet. #1: Instead of eating blue yogurt, eat white yogurt and add your own toppings!

Part of the paradigm shift work that I and my colleagues are urging activists to make is shifting away from seeing this as a “David and Goliath battle”. Corporate constitutional “rights” are fundamentally illegitimate under law. The history lesson we teach makes this absolutely clear. The PROPER Constitutional relationship between We The People and OUR corporate creations is more like We are the Goliaths, and they are merely our tools, like robots or toasters – designed to serve US in specific defined ways and to cause no harm.

This is actually the first century of relevant US history on this matter. And the state chartering of corporations history is unchanged from the late 1700′s. States still have the legal authority to DEFINE the nature of every corporation they charter. They just don’t anymore.

So seeing it as a Goliath struggle is actually part of the problem. I encourage you to check out these links when you have a bit of time. It will help to make this more clear.

Click here to listen to a 30 minute interview with Paul.

Our home is in dire state and getting worse Our life support systems are being destroyed for profit. Insane is a good word to describe the pursuit of profit at the expense of people and the planet. In this excellent essay, you’ll discover the history and current state of corporate power and what’s being done about it at a local level.

Sins of the Fathers: How Corporations Use the Constitution and Environmental Law to Plunder Communities and Nature
Thomas Alan Linzey, Esq., Executive Director
The Community Environmental Legal Defense Fund, Inc.
info@celdf.org

The bumper sticker “Beam me up Scotty, There’s no intelligent life here” is a reflection of our sense of frustration with life on Planet Earth.

Not that we haven’t been told as in Silent Spring, Club of Rome Report in the 70′s and more recently, the annual State of the World reports.

In addition to the major environmental groups — like the Sierra Club, the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council — thousands of community groups composed of hundreds of thousands of good people — perhaps millions — across this nation, have been created.

Those community groups have seen something wrong with what the data reveals — both on an academic and moral level — and have both said that it isn’t sustainable to use the planet the way it is being used — that there is something morally and ethically wrong in destroying millions of years of evolution simply to manufacture X-boxes, SUV’s, disposable cameras, and cheap toilet paper.

There’s no shortage of people who have been paying attention, documenting our demise, and even proposing new ways for people, cities, and the nation to generate renewable energy, practice sustainable agriculture, design livable neighborhoods, protect quality of life.

So, after close to fifty years of environmental activism, after thousands of groups and hundreds of thousands of people have mobilized, after people have given over $500 million a year to the major environmental groups in D.C., after millions of environmental permits have been issued and appealed by people and groups, after many environmental laws have been passed, after lawsuits galore have been filed, after solutions galore have been proposed, and after a slew of environmental regulatory agencies have been created, you would think that problems would have been solved and restoration begun.

You’d be wrong.

Last year, someone asked me why, after decades of work, billions of dollars, the work of thousands of communities, and the involvement of the largest environmental groups, that things are worse now than they’ve ever been.

I answered, it’s because we’ve never had an environmental movement in this country.

What we’ve had is groups and people resisting one hog factory farm at a time, one toxic waste incinerator at a time, one road project at a time, one asphalt plant at a time. We’ve been playing defense — and as anyone who plays strategic games like chess will tell you — if you’re always reacting, you’re going to lose the game.

Peoples’ Movements, on the other hand, are driven by communities unwilling to accept such a defensive role for themselves. Peoples’ movements are about moving beyond defense. They focus instead on fixing the problems of governance that consistently shove them onto the defense in the first place. They question why the law is not on their side.

To read the whole article, click here.

If this information is compelling and you’d like more, you may want to sign up for Paul’s blog to stay up to date on the fast-moving developments of this extraordinary growing movement of local democratic uprisings: PaulCienfuegos.com. There’s also a separate list of his essays, interviews, and talks here.

This just in from the NY Times

An Artist Takes Role of China’s Conscience
By HOLLAND COTTER

The Chinese artist Ai Weiwei, who disappeared into police custody in Beijing after he was detained on Sunday while trying to board a flight for Hong Kong, is a fully 21st-century figure, global-minded, media-savvy, widely networked. He is also the embodiment of a cultural type, largely unfamiliar to the West, that dates far back into China’s ancient past.

In a 30-year career he has combined, often at calculated personal risk, both aspects of his persona to create a role as an outspoken critic of the Chinese government, delivering his most stinging rebukes from within China itself. In light of his detainment, however, his ability to sustain this role, in China at least, would seem to be in serious doubt.

From a Western perspective, Mr. Ai’s career fits a familiar profile. We tend to like our contemporary Chinese artists to come across as aesthetic tradition-busters. (This is one reason that Pop-style Mao paintings by the likes of Wang Guangyi remain big-selling auction items.) In this regard Mr. Ai has not disappointed. In the 1990s he painted Coca-Cola logos on ancient Chinese pots, broke up classical Chinese furniture and photographed himself making a single-digit rude gesture in front of the White House, the Eiffel Tower and Tiananmen Square.

But gradually such Duchampian moves have given way to large-scale, socially critical projects. For a conceptual piece called “Fairytale” at the 2007 Documenta in Kassel, Germany, he placed 1,001 antique Chinese chairs, available for use, throughout the exhibition. He built an outdoor structure from 1,001 doors salvaged from Ming and Qing houses that had been eliminated by rampant development in Chinese cities. Through the Internet he recruited 1,001 Chinese citizen-volunteers to come to Kassel to live for the duration of the show.

In short, he brought a sense of China that was at once inviting, puzzling and pathetic. The chairs were nice to sit in. It was hard to know what to make of the mini-army of temporary residents, who seemed equally uncertain of why they were there. The structure built from old doors finally just collapsed. Over all, “Fairytale” was not a winning picture of his homeland.

Politically, he was coming to be known to the Chinese authorities as a loose cannon with a suspect history: a late-1970s free-speech agitator, later a member of renegade art movements, and a full-time resident of New York from 1981 to 1993. But as an international celebrity he was still a feather in China’s cap at a time when the country was making an all-out effort to become a major cultural presence prior to the 2008 Beijing Summer Olympics.

With this in mind the Chinese government asked Mr. Ai to collaborate with the Swiss architectural firm Herzog & de Meuron on the design for the Olympic stadium, known the Bird’s Nest. He did so. The result was a triumph.

Then something startling happened: He denounced the Olympics as a feel-good whitewash on China’s repressive, market-hungry government. And after the Sichuan earthquake in May 2008, which killed thousands of children who were crushed when their shoddily built schools collapsed, he became an intrepid antiestablishment activist.

As China’s official news channels broadcast upbeat videos of earthquake rescue operations, Mr. Ai was in Sichuan making his own films of the destruction, talking with distraught parents of dead or missing children and using his widely read daily blog to accuse the Sichuan officials of financial corruption that resulted in structurally faulty schools. His accusations of a cover-up extended to the highest levels in Beijing.

To anyone familiar with China’s hardball official politics, Mr. Ai’s aggressive words sounded suicidally aggressive and the silence from the government in Beijing was perplexing. But at this juncture, both parties were almost ceremonially enacting ancient roles. In Chinese culture, going back to Confucius, there has been a tradition of individual scholars and intellectuals denouncing rulers for wrongdoing that was bringing disharmony to society, and particularly if that wrongdoing was injurious to innocence.

Examples of such face-offs recur in traditional literature and painting. And often, but not always, the self-sacrificing honesty of the accuser has rendered him immune to retaliation.

Even in his most antic mode, Mr. Ai has consciously assumed the artist’s natural position as public intellectual in China. It was a position he inherited. He is the son of one of China’s outstanding modern poets and thinkers, one who, like many intellectuals in the 1950s, was labeled “an enemy of the people” and banished, along with his family, to the remote regions and years of menial labor.

Mr. Ai, born in 1957, remembers that time and its hardships. He also remembers his father’s unshattered utopian ideals. His own political coming of age coincided with the family’s return to Beijing in 1976, at a period of relative liberalism, putting him in touch wit a nascent democracy movement. When the ideological climate grew icy again, he left for the United States. He had no American career to speak of — New York wasn’t looking at contemporary Chinese art in the 1980s — but he circulated widely in the downtown art world and learned a lot.

He took this knowledge with him when he returned to China, after his father fell ill in 1993. In Beijing he helped spearhead new, radical, often conceptually based underground movements. And with his big-picture view of international art and his fluent English, he was a primary spokesman for new Chinese art and a link between Chinese artists and a developing audience of Western collectors, curators and critics.

Through all of this, his own work, which came to include sculpture, photography, performance and architecture, fit no definable mode. It was his personal presence as impresario, entrepreneur and social commentator that gave it unity. And increasingly it was the critical commentary that stood out, became a form of performance art, carefully choreographed in all its moves. And those moves were toward ever greater risk.

His attacks on political authority grew sharper, more persistent, more amplified. The noble Confucian model of the morally grounded intellectual speaking truth to power in a single dramatic confrontation was called on so often as to become, seemingly by intention, an unnoble and relentless insistence. And as a result, whatever immunity from reprisal he might once have enjoyed was soon gone.

In 2009 he was beaten by the police and underwent surgery for cerebral hemorrhage. The same year, his blog was shut down, presumably by the government. Selections from it have just been published by MIT Press as a book, “Ai Weiwei’s Blog: Writings, Interviews, and Digital Rants (2006-2009),” edited and translated by Lee Ambrozy. In 2010 he was put under house arrest in Beijing while a newly built studio in Shanghai was razed by city authorities on the pretext of having been built without proper permits.

Even though, like many other intellectuals and activists, he was forbidden to leave China as of December, he announced plans to establish a studio in Berlin. But recently, after popular uprisings in the Middle East and North Africa that began in February, the Chinese authorities have initiated a virulent crackdown. Mr. Ai is far from alone in feeling the force of it, but it is hard to think of many others who have gone so far out of their way to attract it.

And he will continue to, even — or perhaps especially — if he remains in detention. This May an outdoor sculptural piece by Mr. Ai, called “Circle of Animals/Zodiac Heads,” will be installed at the Pulitzer Fountain outside the Plaza Hotel in Manhattan. To most New Yorkers the dozen large cast-bronze animal heads, corresponding to the signs Chinese zodiac, will be simply winsome, or maybe a little freaky. To anyone knowing the historical reference behind these images, they’ll be explosive.

They are based on a set of similar sculptures that once adorned a fountain at the 18th-century imperial Summer Palace called Yuanming Yuan near Beijing. In 1860 French and British soldiers occupying China torched the palace and carried off the zodiac heads, an act which to this day evokes popular outrage in China as an example of colonialist humiliation and of everything hateful about the West.

Getting all the heads back — only some have been returned — has become an impassioned nationalist mission. When two were offered for sale at Christie’s in 2009 as part of the Yves Saint Laurent estate, there were protest demonstrations — almost never allowed in any other context — across China.

What can the Chinese feel about Mr. Ai symbolically plunking the whole set down in New York — and, later this year, in London and Los Angeles? He has symbolically reconstituted an iconic piece of China’s patrimony; but he has done so, perversely, on enemy turf. Yet in the end only one political reality matters: If China prevents Mr. Ai from appearing as scheduled at the sculpture’s debut here on May 2, much of the rest of the world will be united in demanding to know why.

Rather than reviewing his book, I’m going to share a great video interview with Brad and my cousin Alan Hutner, the host of Transitions Radio, a three hour live Sunday radio show and web cast from Santa Fe. Alan has developed an extensive library of interviews with some of the leading visionaries of the past 25 years. An excellent lighthouse of wisdom. Enjoy.

To watch the remaining six segments of Alan’s interview with Brad, click here.