Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness

Anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904–80) has often been referred to as a lost giant of 20th-century thought. He was seen as an outlier and a rebel owing to his willingness to move from discipline to discipline in a field that thrived on specialization. Bateson's curiosity led him to introduce the double-bind theory of schizophrenia and study dolphin communication. He distanced himself from established experts but found audiences open to his ideas in the 1960s, including poet Allen Ginsberg. In London, he pioneered discussion of the "greenhouse effect." This was the first public mention of how fossil fuels could change the earth's climate, melt polar ice caps, and increase sea levels worldwide. The greenhouse effect, with other threats to the environment, was evidence of something referred to as "runaway." A system in runaway was a system out of balance and accelerating toward breakdown—which relates to current ecological concerns.