Green Hour: “Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABC’s of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind” (Prof. Jacob Smith)

Gregory Bateson (1904–1980) began his career as an anthropologist in the 1930s, yet Bateson has also been recognized as an important early practitioner of ethnographic filmmaking, a key figure in the early development of cybernetics, and a point of reference for environmental artists and activists. In fact, Bateson was an important environmental thinker who was sounding the alarm about global warming and runaway patterns of consumption fifty years ago and his research connected the symptoms of ecological crisis to deeply rooted systems of Western thought.

In this talk I will provide a sampling of my new experimental online book, Bateson’s Alphabet in order to facilitate an introduction to Bateson’s “ecology of mind.” The book draws on new archival sources to provide an engaging and accessible, online, hyperlinked interface with Bateson’s system of ecological thought. The talk will mirror the book’s short, alphabetized mini-essays, which put Bateson in conversation with current scholarship in the environmental humanities and ground his ideas in a concrete example from a media text.

Jacob Smith is Professor in the Department of Radio-Television-Film and co-founder of the MA in Sound Arts and Industries at Northwestern University. He has written several books, most recently Eco-Sonic Media (2015), ESC: Sonic Adventure in the Anthropocene (2019), and Lightning Birds: An Aeroecology of the Airwaves (2021). ESC and Lightning Birds are experimental audiobooks that can be heard at the University of Michigan Press website. His most recent book is Bateson’s Alphabet: The ABCs of Gregory Bateson’s Ecology of Mind (University of Michigan Press).