Review: Green Hour: “BATESON’S ALPHABET: THE ABC’S OF GREGORY BATESON’S ECOLOGY OF MIND” (PROF. JACOB SMITH)

The first Green Hour in the semester was an inspiring start that encouraged a lively and interdisciplinary conversation about interfaces between regions (ecotones), deep and local time, literature, art, ritual, and how all of this may play out in new designs in environmental education.

The speaker was Professor Jacob Smith, who introduced his latest work on Gregory Bateson, Bateson’s Alphabet. The book is an intricately composed scholarly, but also playful approach to the multi-talented anthropologist, filmmaker, cybernetics expert, and environmental activist, and it asks (and answers) important questions about environmental knowledge acquisition, writing about environmental issues, and “doing” Environmental Humanities as a scholarly—and creative–practice.