
The Bateson Building (2016) - benbreen
https://jsah.ucpress.edu/content/75/4/469
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PaulDavisThe1st
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...](https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ng-
interactive/2019/sep/29/the-new-alchemists-could-the-past-hold-the-key-to-
sustainable-living)

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.

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rustmachine
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.

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jalessio
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/](https://urbanfootprint.com/)

