BATESON, Gregory.

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Steps to an Ecology of Mind: Collected Essays in Anthropology, Psychiatry, Evolution, and Epistemology. 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 app

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