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# 16

Reach out and make friends

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
Invitations to contemplate these words and play with your thoughts
  • What if we tell a different history
Collections that include this source
  • Entangled Matters

Entangled Matters

This quote has been selected as part of one of the thematic collections of Alterlibrary, titled Entangled Matters.

In this collection, we gather inspirations that invite us to look beyond the boundaries separating nature and society, humans and non-humans, individuals and their environments. We explore how thought, knowledge and imagination emerge through networks of relationships and interdependencies — and what we might learn from thinking of societies as ecosystems.

Here you can explore the collection Entangled Matters.

of our Imagination
Societies as Ecosystems