1:30 PM - 2:45 PM
Session co-Sponsored by The Club of Budapest

Session B:

s to be announced

Tom Hayden changed America", the national correspondent of The Atlantic, Nicholas Lemann, has written. He created the blueprint for the Great Society programs, according to presidential assistant Richard Goodwin. He was "the conscience of the Senate", said Sacramento Bee columnist Dan Walters. According to the Los Angeles Times, when he retired in September 1999 from the state legislature, he received the longest farewell of any legislator in memory. Tom Hayden is 61 years old, born December 11, 1939. He has lived in Los Angeles since 1971. He is married o the actress Barbara Williams, with whom he has an infant son. Tom has two grown children from an earlier marriage to Jane Fonda. Tom was elected to the state Assembly in 1982 and the state Senate in 1992, seven consecutive victories on the west side of Los Angeles and the San Fernando Valley. He also ran "protest" campaigns for Governor and Mayor of Los Angeles during the 90s. Tom's legislative record includes groundbreaking legislation on behalf of women, African-Americans and Latinos, Holocaust survivors and this generation's immigrants working in sweatshops. While in Sacramento, he was regarded by the Sierra Club as the strongest legislative protector of endangered species in the nation. He was recognized as the legislature's foremost watchdog against special interest waste and abuse of power in cases ranging from the LA subway controversy to the UC Irvine fertility scandal. He led the battles in Sacramento to stop university tuition increases, reform the K-12 system, and clean up fiscal mismanagement at LAUSD. Tom was honored as "legislator of the year" by the American Lung Association for his battles against the tobacco industry, by the California League Conservation Voters for his environmental leadership, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference for his civil rights achievements, the UC and Cal State student associations for his committment to affordable higher education, the Jewish National Fund for his committment to Israel, and the Irish-American "Top 100" by Irish America magazine. Tom was a leader of the student, civil rights and anti-war movements in the Sixties, and the environmental and anti-nuclear movements in the Seventies. He is the author of nine books, including The Lost Gospel of the Earth, The Whole World Was Watching and Irish Hunger. The New York Times cited his 1988 book, Reunion, as one of the best 200 of the year.

Jeffrey Cole, Director, Center for Communication Policy, UCLA: Jeffrey Cole has been on the UCLA faculty for the past 27 years and serves as Director of the Center for Communication Policy. His faculty appointment is in the Anderson Graduate School of Management and the Social Science Division of the College of Letters & Science. Cole is Principal Investigator of the UCLA World Internet Project, a long-term longitudinal look at the effects of computer and Internet technology on all aspects of society. At the announcement of the project in June 1999, Vice President Al Gore praised Cole as a "true visionary providing the public with information on how to understand the impact of media." Cole was Principal Investigator of the Network Television Violence Monitoring Project which in 1995, 1996 and 1997 issued annual reports to the television networks, Congress and the nation. Upon the release of the 1996 report, Cole held a joint press conference with President Bill Clinton who referred to the Center for Communication Policy as "the premier educational institution setting trends in entertainment." Nationwide there was unanimous praise for the quality of the reports and their contribution to the television violence debate. Cole has testified before Congress on television issues and has spoken as a keynote and panel member at more than 200 conferences on communications issues. In 1994, 1995 and 1996 the Center co-authored with U.S. News & World Report national surveys examining attitudes and values of decision-makers in the entertainment industry. In 1994 the Center co-sponsored "The Superhighway Summit" in UCLA's Royce Hall with keynote speaker Vice President Gore and the leaders of most of the nation's major media companies. For the annual Family Reunion Conferences in Nashville, Tennessee, Cole has worked with Vice President Gore to produce films opening the 1995 through 2000 conferences. All of the films were screened before an audience of 1,400 including the Vice President and President Clinton. He also has worked directly with Vice President Gore to produce a short film on the issue of smoking and the entertainment industry. Over the past seven years the Center has sponsored or co-sponsored national conferences on the impact of the Internet, religion and prime time television, television and advocacy groups and images of girls in the media. Two major books have come out of the religion and advocacy conferences. Cole has lectured extensively in Asia and Europe and throughout the U.S. He regularly consults with top government officials and leaders of the telecommunications industries throughout the world on communications issues. Over the past 27 years, Cole has taught to over 35,000 students. In 1987 he received the University's Distinguished Teaching Award. In 1998 Cole joined the faculty of the Anderson Graduate School of Management where he is directing the track on Entertainment, Media and Communication.

is the author or editor of 69 books translated into as many as 17 languages, and has over four hundred articles and research papers and six volumes of piano recordings to his credit. He serves as Editor of the monthly World Futures: The Journal of General Evolution and of its associated General Evolution Studies book series. Laszlo is generally recognized as the founder of systems philosophy and general evolution theory, serving as Founder-Director of the General Evolution Research Group and as Past President of the International Society for the Systems Sciences. He is the recipient of the highest degree in philosophy and human sciences of the Sorbonne, the University of Paris, as well as of the coveted Artist Diploma of the Franz Liszt Academy of Budapest. His numerous prizes and awards include four Honorary Doctorates.

Ervin Laszlo’s unusual career spans music, philosophy, science, futures studies, and world affairs. Born in Budapest, Hungary in 1932, his talent for music was discovered at the age of five. At seven he was admitted to the Franz Liszt Academy under the wing of famed composer-conductor Ernst von Dohnanyi. His debut with the Budapest Philharmonic at the age of nine established him as one of the great child prodigies of the time. Following a hiatus of barely a year due to the siege of Budapest at the end of World War II, Laszlo embarked on an international music career highlighted by the Grand Prize of the International Music Competition of Geneva in 1947, and a New York recital debut a few months later. Just fifteen, he was hailed by New York’s critics as an artist who has few peers among pianists of any age. With major write-ups in LIFE, Time, Newsweek, and other national and international media, Laszlo settled in New York and travelled from there to tour the five continents.

In his late teens Laszlo’s childhood interest, fostered by his philosopher uncle in Budapest, in questions about meaning in nature and life and destiny in society resurfaced. It prompted him to undertake systematic readings on these fields and to follow courses and seminars in New York’s Columbia University and New School for Social Research. His copious notes accompanied him on his concert tours and in 1961 were the subject of a casual dinner conversation following a recital in The Hague. His dinner partner, who showed keen interest in his ideas, took the notes and reappeared the following morning with an offer to publish them—he turned out to be the philosophy editor of the famed Dutch publishing house Martinus Nijhoff. The publication of these notes two years later marked a turning point in Laszlo’s career. He was asked to join the University of Fribourg’s Institute of East European Studies, and two books and numerous research papers later received an invitation to spend a year at the Philosophy Department at Yale University.

Laszlo’s professional involvement in science and philosophy followed a consistent if highly personal path. His main interest centered on the perennial "great questions" of science and philosophy, in particular the origins of the cosmos, the nature and direction of the evolution of life and of consciousness, and the meaning of the changes and transformations we are witnessing today in culture and civilization. His initial 1963 book Essential Society: An Ontological Reconstruction was inspired by the metaphysics of Whitehead and was followed by Beyond Scepticism and Realism, a methodological treatise, and Individualism, Collectivism and Political Power, an analysis of the ideological divide in the postwar world. La Metaphysique de Whitehead, an application of Whitehead’s "organic philosophy" to human society, served as Laszlo’s thesis at the Sorbonne for the Doctorat d’Etat es-Lettres et Sciences Humaines, completing his formal credentials in the academic world.

While at Yale, Laszlo read von Bertalanffy’s General System Theory, met von Bertalanffy, and began to elaborate Introduction to Systems Phiosophy, the seminal work with which his name became thereafter associated. Appointments at various US Universities, including the State University of New York, led to a visiting semester at Princeton’s Center of International Studies. His seminar at the Woodrow Wilson School on the systems approach to world order engaged the attention of Club of Rome founder Aurelio Peccei, who enlisted Laszlo to complement the economic and physical "outer limits" emphasis of the Club’s first Report, The Limits to Growth, with a human and cultural "inner limits" orientation. Laszlo’s research resulted in 1977 in the publication of the voluminous Goals for Mankind, the third global report to The Club of Rome, as well as of the personal treatise, The Inner Limits of Mankind. To research these works the Executive Director of the United Nations Institute for Training and Research (UNITAR) invited Laszlo as Special Fellow; an appointment that was followed by his being placed in charge of the Institute’s work on the New International Economic Order. As Programme Director Laszlo spent seven years at UN headquarters in New York, producing fifteen volumes on the New International Economic Order and another six volumes on Regional and Interregional Cooperation.

Having completed these assignments in the mid-80s, Laszlo decided to take a sabbatical period before returning to his university. He moved to his converted medieval farmhouse in Tuscany in search of the peace and freedom to analyze his experience in the academic world and at the United Nations. He returned to his quest of researching anwers to the great questions of evolution in our time. His Evolution: The Grand Synthesis was published in 1987 and was soon translated into Italian, German, Spanish, French, Chinese, and Portuguese. It was followed by the application of his evolutionary insights to contemporary society: The Age of Bifurcation. Inspiring considerable debate and discussion, it appeared in Russian and Turkish in addition to all of the previous languages.

Laszlo’s reading and research at his Tuscan farmhouse was soon punctuated by frequent visits to the US, Japan, China, and many parts of Europe, as the United Nations University, the newly formed European Culture Impact Research Consortium, and then Federico Mayor, the Director-General of Unesco, sought his advice and collaboration. These activities culminated in 1993, when Laszlo, one of the two plenary speakers at the Third World Congress of the World Federation of Hungarians (the other being nuclear scientist Edward Teller), proposed that Hungary, neither a major economic nor a military power but a significant force in the field of science, art, and culture, should be the host to an international "Artist’s and Writer’s Club" to complement the Club of Rome’s insistence on economic and political measures with emphasis on the urgency of new thinking, better values, and a deeper sense of personal and professional responsibility. The Hungarian government responded with the offer to set up the secretariat of the worldwide organization that was to become known as The Club of Budapest.

Since the middle of the 1990s Laszlo has been dividing his time and energies between fundamental research in the new sciences—resulting in a series of books (The Creative Cosmos, 1993, The Interconnected Universe, 1995, and The Whispering Pond, 1996)—and building up the worldwide organization and activities of the Club. He produced the first Report to the Club in 1997: Third Millennium: The Challenge and the Vision. The definitive enlarged and updated version of this Report is MACROSHIFT: Navigating the Transformation to a Sustainable Civilization, slated for publication in September, 2001.

In addition to designing and overseeing the global projects of The Club of Budapest, including the annual awarding of the Planetary Consciousness Prizes and the celebration of the World Day of Planetary Consciousness (on March 20) and the World Day of Planetary Ethics (on September 22), Laszlo is currently completing two major science books, Coherence in Cosmos and Consciousness, and the more popularly oriented Holos: The Fabulous World of the New Sciences.