HEALING AND RECONCILIATION AS THE BASIS FOR THE SUSTAINABILITY OF LIFE: AN ECOLOGICAL PLEA FOR A “DEEP” HEALING AND RECONCILIATION1

The global free market has become the complex venue where all living beings in the web of life have been turned into commodities. Globalization is the accelerated global integration of capital, production and markets, and has become a code name for the transnational “corporatization”of the world. Globalization id incompatible with justice, peace and security, diverse cultural identities, socio‐psychological sustainability, and ecological environmental sustainability. Globalization is a process that brings about disintegration between economy and ecology, history and nature, lifestyle and spirituality, and the local and global. The impact of globalization has brought the web of life to near‐total chaos, and to the point of a critical breakdown of sustainability. Put another way, globalization has led both to the impoverishment of many peoples' total life experience, and to the detrimental effects that are taking place upon the ecosystems of the ‘earth household’. The equity and balance of the web of life based on the principle of interdependency are being totally disordered and destroyed. Therefore, the fundamental sustainability of the whole living system that makes up life on earth is now at a critical stage. Behind the path of globalization is an anthropocentric worldview. This holds a dualistic view of humanity and nature; it believes that unlimited material progreaa is to be achieved through economic and technological growth at the expense of nature. An alternative to anthropocentric thinking is life‐centric systemic thinking, which shifts our view of the world from the mechanistic worldview of Descartes and Newton to a holistic, ecological view. This requires us to integrate his‐tory with nature, and economy with ecology, and to do so from the perspectives of inseparable relationships, interconnectedness and contexts. Life‐centric systemic thinking can only provide the in‐depth foundational perception, strategy and praxis for a “deep” healing and reconciliation of the wounded and broken web of the ‘earth household’. Today, what sustainability really means should be extended to the entire web of life, on which our long‐term survival depends. We need to understand the principles of organization that ecosystems have developed to sustain the web of life. We need particularly to reflect on the interdependency between humans and the earth, because the paradigms of human relationships have been intrinsically and intuitively shaped by the relationship between