Gregory Bateson’s Steps to an Ecology of Mind (1972) [notes] “We live in a world that is only made of relationships” and these relationships are more important and fundamental than species as singular units. Bateson and systems theory develop our understanding of relations in order to get us outside of singular unit thinking. Unlike Darwin, who proposed “the unit of survival was either the family line or the species,” for Bateson the “unit of survival is organism plus environment. We are learning by bitter experience that the organism which destroys its environment destroys itself.”
A multispecies approach acknowledges the entanglement for mutual survival.
T.J.Demos, The Routledge Companion to Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change, 2021
