The questions were asked by Jörg Altekruse in Hamburg on May 11, 2005. The Right Livelihood Award Foundation invites everybody to freely copy and publish both text and MP3 audio files.

The text and audio of this interview are also available in German.

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1. Mr. Uexkull, how did you originally conceive the idea of creating an Alternative Nobel Prize 25 years ago?

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Uexkull: I was always interested both in problems and in solutions, and I always was surprised that we continue living with problems to which there are solutions. And I wondered why many of these solutions were not being taken seriously. And I also asked: How do you get taken seriously? And so having grown up in Sweden, it was clear that if you win a Nobel Prize, you get taken seriously. And therefore I proposed to the Nobel Foundation to introduce a prize for this new important issue, for the environment, and also a prize relevant to the needs of the people in the so-called 'Third World'. And although I offered to provide some money to get this off the ground to get them take it seriously, they turned it down. But in the meantime I told so many people about this idea and had so much support that I decided to try to do it myself. Of course in a much smaller way than the Nobel Prizes, because I had made some money by dealing in rare postage stamps, which is, of course, less profitable than inventing dynamite like Alfred Nobel did.

2. Are your first laureates still active? And did their work prove to be as forward-looking as you had thought?

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Uexkull: I think so. Hassan Fathy, the architect of the poor, is of course no longer alive. But his argument that modernity does not mean rejecting the past - in his case of course the adobe mud brick building techniques of North Africa - but means learning from the past and modernising these ancient building techniques, I think that is more and more being understood. And his co-recipient the first year, Plenty International, an aid organisation set up by a commune of North-American hippies, is also still active and very relevant, because, of course, these people live very simple lives materially and therefore, I think, were more able to understand the real needs of people in the so-called third world than highly paid UN or World Bank employees, which is why many of their projects have been so successful.

3. You present the award to people and organisations offering solutions to 'mankind's most urgent challenges', as you put it. Have these challenges changed during the past 25 years?

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Uexkull: I think these challenges have become more difficult, because we have wasted so much time. The 'Limits to Growth' warned about many of the ecological challenges, which of course also imply the challenges of global justice. But this was ridiculed and ignored for a long time. Now it is being rediscovered. But of course these wasted years means that it is going to be much more difficult to find solutions and implement solutions in the time we have left.

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...continued: There are very many examples as far as ecological limits goes, and one is perhaps oil, where the idea was ridiculed that oil was running out. And now suddenly even the experts are realising that the peak oil - the time when oil reserves are maximal, have reached their peak - is coming maybe even this or next year. And from then on oil will become a scarcer commodity and that will have enormous impact on our society, because or society, our economic system, is not based just on oil, it is based on cheap oil. So I think many of these ecological limits are now being rediscovered, but, as I said, with 25 or 30 wasted years behind us.

4. Is it as difficult today for your recipients to make their voices heard as it was 25 years ago? Or have issues like peace, the environment and human rights become mainstream?

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Uexkull: I think in some ways it is easier, they have in some ways become much more known. At the same time, there is now a huge sort of global cacophony of noise and commercial noise, commercial advertising especially, drowning out alternatives. So while they may have more publicity on their national level, they face these two problems: First of all, that all news today are very sort of short-term and sound-bite oriented. It is more difficult, I think, probably than it was 25 years ago, when you get access to the media, to actually have the space to explain complex problems and solutions. But also the problem that even if you do win a hearing nationally, the global influence is such that it is much, much more difficult to actually even maintain what you have achieved.

5. Let us look into the future: What would be your favourite kind of initiative to present the Right Livelihood Award to in 25 years?

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Uexkull: Well, my hope is that in 25 years we will be still awarding initiatives which are working on solving problems but that the framework within we give it will not be quite as urgent and perhaps desperate as today. You know, there will still be environmental problems, there will still be problems, I am sure, of global justice. But I hope we will have not this feeling of urgency, which there is now, that we will have come a great deal further in solving these problems. Maybe it is perhaps more a sort of mopping-up situation. Maybe the scenarios, which our award recipients then will have to work with, are less catastrophic than those we face today.