A nthony C haney . Runaway

Anthony Chaney’s book Runaway: Gregory Bateson, the Double Bind, and the Rise of Ecological Consciousness begins in 1967 at the London Congress on the Dialectics of Liberation. That opening signals that the book interrogates activism and postmodernism in the post–World War II era. In London, Gregory Bateson—the anthropologist turned psychiatric researcher turned social theorist—introduced the audience to the so-called “greenhouse effect” and an impending ecocatastrophe. Bateson’s lecture profoundly affected the worldview of the poet Allen Ginsberg, who was in the audience. That, then, is the point of Runaway: to illuminate the importance of the “relatively unknown” Bateson as “representative . . . of a broader project across the sciences, humanities, and the arts” to clarify and define reality, culminating in the rise of “ecological consciousness” (2, 17). It is a fascinating book that asks the reader to track three main threads: a biography of Bateson; a cultural history about the anxieties produced by Western industrialization; and an intellectual history of systems theories. For Chaney, it is Bateson who weaves those threads into a rope connecting the Darwinist world to ecological consciousness, a condition that forced Western societies to identify that the earth’s systems are in a runaway state toward possible destruction.

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