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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

What if we tell a different history

Putting our relationships, friends, colleagues, partners, neighbours, or just the shopkeeper on the corner, at the center of our survival, not only unsettles our belief in the dominance of evolution, genes and biology, it also tells us how important it is to make friends, be friendly and to meet on equal footing. Telling history then means to stop speaking of heros and strong individuals, but to look at their network of relationships, their partners, friends and maybe their fish monger.

of our Imagination