Lewis Mumford and the ecology of technics

Abstract

This article examines Lewis Mumford's scholarship and his contribution to the emergence of media ecology as both an intellectual tradition and a theoretical perspective on the study of technology, media, and culture. After a biographical sketch with an emphasis on the larger historical contexts in which Mumford's scholarship is located, this analysis focuses on three aspects of Mumford's voluminous work that has contributed to the foundations of media ecology: his epochal historiography of technology, the techno‐organicism in his thinking about technology and human development, and his critique of the megamachine. The essay concludes with a discussion of the ecological ethics inherent in Mumford's work, his life, and the activism embedded in his media ecology.