Human survival requires a reorientation of science away from its exclusive technical and materialist premises focused on control, towards feedback and relational processes of organism-plus-environment. Gregory Bateson's holistic approach unites culture, communication, psychology, biology and ecology within a single trans-disciplinary enquiry substituting pattern, perceptual difference, and relations for 'thinginess' of scientific data.

Peter Harries-Jones is Professor Emeritus of Anthropology at York University. He is the author of A Recursive Vision: Ecological Understanding and Gregory Bateson (Toronto).