Human society has become the victim of an escalating social system crisis. All over the world citizens are hit – down to the childhood – by an alienation syndrome, and open-minded observers begin to describe the history of our species as an evolutionary failure. The Scandinavian R&D institute EcoLife is one of the still rare institutions which have diagnosed the situation as a deep paradigm crisis and try to define the new landmarks of a system change. While some frontline actors choose to follow one or a few strings into the future, others are applying an epic humanitarian and spiritual strategy and preach social revival. Our contribution is a life scientific analysis which tries to diagnose the organic system errors and describe their ecological consequences. Basically, we regard human existence as a privileged exponent of planetary life under the sun in our cosmic neighbourhood. Still, a radical global mindnet is much needed in order to stop the self-destructive madness exposed in our time.

The intellectual inspiration for our effort derives from the literally contact with the sagacious reflections of a couple of spearheads from the last half century. Clear-eyed personalities as Arne Naess, Johan Galtung, E. F. Schumacher, Fritjof Capra, Murray Bookchin, Neil Postman, Hazel Henderson and David C. Korten stand on the frontline. But the liberating inspiration is given by our contact with the expanding global youth movements of the last decades. Their audacious manifestations have awakened our hope that the technomaniac repression of the ruling world bureaucracy can be averted.

The most progressive initiative for a long time within the civic movement is the U.S. alternative Occupy Wall Street and its global allied. It represents an uncompromising symbolic break with the megapowers of late-modernity, which is the financial world hierarchy. The impatient civic public now eagerly raises the question what the next step of the ultimate rebellions will be. Our spontaneous bid is that the time has come for transforming the social protests to life-dynamic action and to start erecting self-supportive Earth-communities. It should be done on a global scale and we have to hurry on in order to prevent the threatening prognosis of a planetary collapse. The life scientific models sketched by our socio-ecological project is a functional contribution, which can easily be tested in social reality. We name it the ecological challenge.