The Bateson Building (2016)

Wow. Just Wow.

I'm a 56 year old software engineer who grew up in London and now lives in a tiny village in New Mexico. This article manages to somehow cover a huge part of the culture that so influenced my life growing up - Bateson, Van Der Ryn, Brand, Alexander, and so many more - even though I lived thousands of miles from the putative "new age state" it describes. My subscription to CoEvolution Quarterly, my prized copies of Domebook 2, Shelter, the New Alchemists, newsletters from the Farallones Institute - odd source material for a teenager living in the middle of the punk explosion, but well, that was what I did.

The ideas that were circulating then form part of a semi-coherent body of knowledge that I tend to feel is insufficiently visible, especially to today's younger people currently exploring the same questions and dissatisfactions.

Understanding why these efforts failed, and when they didn't, seems to me an incredibly useful effort. This article was written in 2016 ... it would be nice if there turn out to be more critical but highly informed analyses of the evolution of and outcomes from the ideas of the "movements" (whatever you call them) that were surfacing in the 75-85 period. The Observer (UK) had a similar though less in-depth study of the New Alchemists recently:

https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-interactive/2019...

Putting on my old(er) person hat: you kids who want to change the world, go back and understand why the efforts of people 2-4 times your age turned out the way they did.

And now ... I need to get back to working on my own install of a 6.6kW solar array, and my New Mexico garden (featuring sub-irrigated beds, and idea that should have been in CoEvolution Quarterly, but wasn't) and our old adobe house, as I get ready to release version 6.0 of Ardour. Meanwhile, Stewart Brand's friends (Shel Kaphan) and his intellectual children (me) helped build that e-commerce website we all increasingly love to hate. Funny how things turn out.

Thanks so much for sharing. I've been fascinated by Bateson for a long time, but i didnt know much about the environment he did his thinking in, nor how/if his ideas had ever had any political influence. This article was very illuminating.

Im 30 and living in Denmark, and reading Bateson its always been baffling to me that his ideas (or ideas like them) have not had a larger impact. It seems like my generation is talking about many of the exact same issues that Bateson have written about so brilliantly. I cant tell whether his ideas are genius or just so outdated that they seem new to me.

Do you know of any more articles that put this ecological movement into historical perspective? I'd love to read more.

To bring this all the way through to 2020 and HN, I'm currently employed at a startup[1] cofounded by Peter Calthorpe, one of the architects of the Bateson Building named in the article!

I happened to be in Sacramento with him a few years back for a meeting and we dropped by the building for a quick tour and verbal history lesson.

1. https://urbanfootprint.com/