Gregory Bateson serves as a wonderful introduction to some of the central concepts of ecology. Call the systemic forces God if you will. Lack of systemic wisdom is always punished… Systems are punishing of any species unwise enough to quarrel with its ecology. If you follow the common-sense dictates of consciousness you become, effectively, greedy and unwise. Purposive consciousness, pulls out from the total mind, sequences which do not have the loop structure which is characteristic of the whole systemic structure.

On the one hand we have the systemic nature of the individual human being, the systemic nature of the culture in which he lives, and the systemic nature of the biological ecological system around him and on the other hand, the curious twist in the systemic nature of the individual man whereby consciousness is almost by necessity, blinded to the systemic nature of the man himself. A pathology – a loss of balance – is threatened. Conscious purpose is now empowered to upset the balances of the body, of society, and of the biological world around us. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive.This is a book we should all read and ponder.'-Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was the author of Naven and Mind and Nature.Today the purposes of consciousness are implemented by more and more effective machinery, transportation systems, airplanes, weaponry, medicine, pesticides and so forth.

Harding, New York Review of Books ' view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large.'-D. Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. 'This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life.

With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers. Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead.

Bateson steps to an ecology of mind