ABSTRACT
One of the most important lessons that can be drawn from the Amazon is that social systems and ecosystems should coevolve. They should be allowed to coevolve locally and regionally rather than be overridden through the imposition of external value, knowledge, organizational, and technological systems. Such impositions are likely to lead to both social and environmental disasters. For cultural and natural systems to coevolve on a regional scale, cohesion within the region and separation from other regions are necessary. Communities, cultures, and bioregions are social structures for which system cohesion and separation are understood to be required. But these commonly understood terms are at the mercy of two currently more dominant concepts, individualism and globalism. Dominated by individualism and globalism, communities, cultures, and bioregions little influence either conscious social design or unconscious social evolution.
