ABSTRACT
Over the last five hundred years, the West has developed a social system that is socially and ecologically unsustainable and destructive. This social system has been spread around the world by Western imperialism in the colonial and postcolonial periods and is now the dominant social system on the planet. The phenomenon of a life system becoming a vicious system rather than a virtuous and self-sustaining system, and thus overshooting and destroying the social and ecological conditions on which it depends for its sustainability and collapsing, is not unusual in the history of human systems or non-human living systems. Symbiotic ecosystems are the ground of life and socioecosystems are the ground of human life. Sustained life is a property of ecological systems rather than of single organisms or species.
