by sp on October 29, 2011
Here is a new book worth checking out, an exploration of experience of lakes and the science of lakes. I met the author, Darby Nelson, at the 2011 North American Lake Management Society meeting in Spokane. Just by chance I set down with him and his wife Geri at the poster session reception and we started talking. Darby reminded me that one of the things Henry David Thoreau did was to sound Walden Pond and demonstrate to the locals that its depths were not infinite.
- Author: Darby Nelson
- Michigan State University Press, 2012
Available from Amazon.
by sp on December 10, 2008
In describing the four domains of ecosystem design, I mentioned that I was taking Bateson’s “ecology of mind” as the name for my fourth domain. I want to expand on that a bit. Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind was first published in 1972. Bateson died in 1980, and while the effects of his thinking still reverberate through many fields, I don’t hear much discussion of his work anymore. Nevertheless, some of the lessons he taught are still profoundly important and the pathologies of thought he sought to uncover and replace with better thoughts are still dominent.
While a later book, Mind & Nature–A Necessary Unity (publisher 1979), is probably a easier introduction to his thinking, the seminal expression of those key ideas can be found in the essay “Form, Substance, and Difference” in Steps.
Bateson liked to tell stories, kind of parables, to get at the roots of the ideas he was exploring. In contrast to my friends in ecology and ecological engineering who, following Howard Odum, believe that “energy” and “the quality of energy” are concepts on which to build explanations, Bateson’s view was that “energy does not explain.” [click to continue…]