Thom Hartmann, who started in radio in 1968, is also is an internationally known speaker on culture and communications, an author, and an innovator in the fields of psychiatry, ecology, and economics. The co-founder (with his wife, Louise) of The New England Salem Children’s Village (1978) and The Hunter School (1997), he has led national innovations in the areas of residential treatment for abused children and private/public education for learning-disabled children.
Hartmann is the four-time Project Censored Award-winning, New York Times best-selling author of nineteen books currently in print in over a dozen languages on five continents. He is the former executive director of a residential treatment program for emotionally disturbed and abused children, and has helped set up hospitals, famine relief programs, schools, and refugee centers in India, Uganda, Australia, Colombia, Russia, and the United States through the German-based Salem International program. Formerly rostered with the State of Vermont as a psychotherapist, founder of The Michigan Healing Arts Center, and licensed as an NLP Trainer by Richard Bandler (who wrote the foreword to one of Thom's books), he was the originator of the revolutionary "Hunter/Farmer Hypothesis" to understand the psychiatric condition known as Attention Deficit Hyperactive Disorder (ADHD). A guest faculty member at Goddard College in Vermont, he also synthesized the “Younger/Older Culture model” for describing the underpinnings - and possible solutions - to the world’s ecological and socio-political crises, suggesting that many of our problems are grounded in cultural “stories” which go back thousands of years. His most recent books are "Screwed: The Undeclared War Against the Middle Class," “The Edison Gene,” “The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight,” “Unequal Protection: The Rise of Corporate Dominance and the Theft of Human Rights,” "We The People: A Call to Take Back America," and "What Would Jefferson Do?"
Hartmann’s books have been written about in Time and many other magazines, he has been on NPR and BBC radio and CNN television (among others), mentioned on the front page of The Wall Street Journal, and has spoken to hundreds of thousands of people on five continents over the past two decades.
One of his books was selected for inclusion in the permanent collection of the Smithsonian for its “visionary use of information technology to produce positive social, economic, and educational change in medicine.” His book The Prophet’s Way led to an unsolicited invitation to a private audience with Pope John Paul II in 1998. His book The Last Hours of Ancient Sunlight led to a September, 1999 unsolicited invitation to spend a week with His Holiness The Dalai Lama at his home in Dharamsala, India, and inspired a web-based movie ("Global Warning") written and produced by Leonardo DiCaprio.
A recurrent theme in Hartmann’s work is that all true and lasting cultural change begins with new insights propagating through enough people to reach a critical mass. History demonstrates, he says, that “when stories change, the world changes.” (Good examples from the 20th century are the stories that women in America should not be allowed to vote, or that African Americans should have separate facilities and schools.) Once these millennia-old toxic stories began to break down, cultural change came relatively quickly.
In the radio field, Hartmann worked from 1968 to 1978 as a DJ, reporter, news anchor, and program director for a variety of commercial radio stations, and today hosts a daily nationally-syndicated talk show. He’s also contributed to the American economy: in the business world he has founded seven corporations over the past 30 years, five of which he has sold and are still thriving and one, a nonprofit, most recently featured in a 2005 photo in Newsweek.
Coming back behind the microphone, Hartmann began in Spring 2002 a "liberal" talk radio show syndicated on stations from coast to coast, on the Sirius satellite radio system, and streamed live on the internet.
An inveterate traveler and sometimes a risk-taker, Hartmann has often found himself in the world's hot spots on behalf of the German-based Salem international relief organization or as a writer, a situation which causes his friends to sometimes wonder aloud if he works for the CIA (he does not and never has). He was, for example, in The Philippines when Ferdinand Marcos fled the country; in Egypt the week Anwar Sadat was shot; in Uganda during the war of liberation by Tanzania; in Hungary when the first East German refugees arrived; in Germany when the wall came down; in Beijing during the first student demonstrations; in Thailand when the military coup of 1991 occurred; in Barbados during the 2004 anti-government strikes and shutdowns; in Bogota and Medellin, Colombia, during the spate of killings of presidential candidates; in Israel, in the West Bank town of Nablus, the week the Intifada started there; on the Czech border the week Chernobyl melted down; in Kenya during the first big wave of crackdowns on dissidents; and in Venezuela during the 1991 coup attempt. He has been successful in avoiding some disasters, however. For example, he was out of the country when George H.W. Bush picked Dan Quayle as his running mate.
The father of three grown children, he lives in Portland, Oregon with his wife Louise, to whom he's been married for over 35 years.
http://www.thomhartmann.com/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=15&Itemid=32
Printer-friendly format
Email this thread to a friend
Bookmark this thread
(694 posts)
Send PM |
Profile |
Ignore
