We can see that changes to our consumption, production, and working patterns alone won’t be enough to sustain a profound transformation towards a just and sustainable world.
To really change the systems destroying the world, we need to fundamentally revisit our relationship with nature, and dismantle the nature/culture divide that justifies the treatment of the Earth as a resource. We need cosmological limits to growth because they steer the discussion beyond socioeconomic transformations to the more active, cultural direction of degrowth processes. To change the way we see nature, and, eventually, act towards it, is a fundamental condition for constraining harmful growth. If we consider ourselves part of nature and practice reciprocal behaviours, then we can eventually reinscribe cosmological limits to growth. However, changing the way we think and feel (“sentipensar”) requires a cultural transformation of a magnitude that has not yet been acknowledged by degrowth scholarship.