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First edition, first printing, inscribed by the author on the front free endpaper, "For Lucy and Jack Saunders, from Gregory Bateson May 9, 1974". An influential text in environmental studies, this collection of essays sought "to disclose the patterns connecting different points of view in an ecological field" (ODNB). Gregory Bateson (1904-1980) was "a dazzlingly versatile thinker, whose work shaped the fields of anthropology, linguistics and cybernetics, as well as the movement we now call environmentalism" (Macfarlane). The son of the outspoken biologist and pioneer of genetics William Bateson, Gregory studied anthropology at Cambridge under the ethnologist A. C. Haddon. He spent his early years conducting fieldwork into the self-regulating systems that existed amongst the indigenous communities of New Britain and New Guinea. Following his wide-ranging research into cybernetics, schizophrenia, and inter-species communication, Bateson developed his influential "double-bind" theory, which he used to warn of an impending ecological and environmental crisis; he sounded one of the first warnings of the greenhouse effect and its potential to cause irreversible climate change in 1967. "He anticipated some innovative trends in late twentieth-century anthropology, such as exploration of the culturally viable relations between 'nature' and 'culture', of environmentalism, and the application of anthropology to the study of natural science" (ODNB). The work begins with a series of "metalogues" which take the form of conversations with the author's daughter, the cultural anthropologist Mary Catherine Bateson (1939-2021), on questions such as "Why Do Things Get In a Muddle" and "How Much Do You Know". The work discusses evolution, anthropological patterns, and the ecology of the mind. "By the late 1960s, Bateson had embraced the insights of second-wave cybernetics and developed a global, communication-based theory of being and evolution. [He] outlined a vision of the natural world as a set of information systems in interaction with one another. Individuals were both elements of this larger system and systems in their own right. Through cybernetics, Bateson explained, humans could finally recognise that the individual was no more than 'a servosystem coupled with its environment'" (Turner, p. 123). We have been unable to identify the recipients. Robert Macfarlane, "Why We Need Nature Writing", The New Statesman, 2 Sep. 2015; Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Steward Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism, 2006. Octavo. Frontispiece, 6 full-page illustrations. Original blue cloth, spine and rear cover lettered in white. With dust jacket. Head of spine gently bumped, faint foxing to top edge and endpapers, contents clean; jacket with pronounced insect damage in places, the spine and pictorial panels largely unaffected but resulting in some loss at extremities and splits along joints of flaps, the latter neatly repaired with Japanese tissue: a near-fine copy in a just about good jacket.
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