This contribution extends the reflection on the transition from a
culture of power toward a culture of limits. If the denial of finitude is one of the deepest expressions of the culture of power, the contemporary energy system provides one of its clearest material manifestations. Our civilization has built much of its prosperity on the capacity to appropriate ever-increasing quantities of energy and matter, while treating ecological limits as obstacles to be overcome rather than conditions to be respected.
The transition from growth to post-growth therefore raises a difficult question:
Can humanity transform its energy system without transforming the culture of power that governs its relationship with nature?
This is not merely a technological question. It concerns how societies understand prosperity, territory, resources, time, and the material conditions of life.
Following the see ~ judge ~ act pattern, this contribution examines the energy transition as a concrete expression of the broader civilizational movement toward limits.
SEE — The Energy System and the Culture of Extraction
The contemporary energy crisis reveals a profound contradiction. Fossil fuels are increasingly recognized as environmentally destructive, yet the economic system remains structurally dependent on abundant energy availability. When conventional resources become more difficult or expensive to extract, the response is not necessarily to reduce energy dependence. It often consists of extending the technological frontier: deeper extraction, unconventional hydrocarbons, hydraulic fracturing, larger infrastructures, and increasingly complex supply chains.
The problem, therefore, is not simply that fossil fuels are “dirty.” The deeper problem is a culture that assumes that every material limit can be overcome through technological power.
Hydraulic fracturing provides a revealing example. Instead of interpreting declining accessibility of conventional resources as a signal to reduce dependence on extraction, the system develops technologies designed to reach previously inaccessible reserves. The technological achievement is real. But its cultural significance is even more important: once again, the limit is interpreted as a challenge to be conquered.
At the same time, renewable energies are expanding and are indispensable for reducing dependence on fossil fuels. Yet the language of “clean energy” can conceal the material foundations of the transition. Solar panels, wind turbines, batteries, transmission networks, electric vehicles, and other infrastructures require minerals, territory, water, industrial capacity, and energy.
The danger, therefore, is not that renewable energy is undesirable. The danger is that a society organized around unlimited expansion may attempt to reproduce the same extractive pattern through a new technological infrastructure.
Here the Jevons paradox becomes particularly relevant. Efficiency can reduce the resources required per unit of production while simultaneously stimulating an increase in total consumption. A more efficient civilization is not necessarily a civilization that consumes less.
The critical question is therefore not only:
How can we produce cleaner energy?
It is:
How much energy and how many materials can human societies use without destroying the regenerative systems upon which their own existence depends?
JUDGE — From Clean Energy to Regenerative Energy
The distinction between “dirty” and “clean” energy is insufficient.
A genuinely ecological perspective must examine the complete material metabolism of energy systems. It must consider extraction, water consumption, territorial transformation, infrastructure, waste, embodied energy, mineral requirements, and the regenerative capacity of ecosystems.
This perspective changes the meaning of sustainability.
Sustainability cannot simply mean maintaining the same level of economic expansion through a different energy technology. Nor can it mean replacing fossil extractivism with a new form of green extractivism.
The deeper transition must be a transition from extraction to regeneration.
Extraction asks:
How much can we obtain from a territory?
Regeneration asks:
How much can a territory sustain without losing its capacity to reproduce the conditions of life?
The difference is fundamental.
This issue becomes particularly important when considering water systems and high-altitude ecosystems such as the Andean páramos. These territories should not be understood simply as spaces containing resources that can receive competing economic valuations. Their ecological functions are part of the material infrastructure of human survival.
Water, biodiversity, soils, forests, and mountain ecosystems operate according to temporalities radically different from those of financial markets.
Financial capital operates through accelerated cycles of investment, return, and accumulation.
Ecological systems operate through cycles of regeneration.
The conflict between these temporalities is one of the central problems of the ecological transition.
A financial project may generate returns within a few years. An ecosystem may require decades to recover—or may never recover—after irreversible degradation.
A profound intergenerational asymmetry therefore emerges: the present can appropriate economic benefits while transferring a significant share of ecological risks to the future.
The question is no longer simply how much an ecosystem is worth.
The question is whether there are ecological functions whose destruction should be considered unacceptable because they constitute material conditions for the existence of future generations.
ACT — Toward a Culture of Regeneration
A culture of limits cannot remain an abstract ethical principle. It must become an organizing principle for economic, energy, and territorial policies.
This requires changing the criteria by which energy projects are evaluated.
It is not enough to ask whether a technology emits less carbon. We must also ask:
Does it reduce absolute energy and material consumption, or merely improve efficiency?
Does it respect the regenerative capacity of water systems and ecosystems?
Does it transfer environmental costs from wealthier consumers to more vulnerable territories and populations?
Does it reduce dependence on extraction, or merely relocate extraction elsewhere?
Does it preserve the ecological conditions required by future generations?
And, above all:
Does it contribute to human well-being within ecological limits, or does it merely make it technically possible to prolong unlimited expansion for a little longer?
These questions lead toward a different understanding of post-growth.
Post-growth cannot simply mean growing more slowly.
Nor can it mean preserving existing patterns of consumption while finding new energy sources capable of sustaining them.
It requires a cultural transformation in which sufficiency, reciprocity, care, and regeneration become legitimate principles of collective prosperity.
This is the practical meaning of a culture of limits.
Limits are not merely restrictions imposed upon human freedom. They are also the ecological conditions that make freedom possible.
A river that continues to flow is a limit to extraction, but also a condition of life.
A páramo that remains intact is a limit to mining, but also a source of water.
A forest that remains standing is a limit to immediate appropriation, but also a reservoir of ecological possibilities.
Finite energy availability is a constraint on unlimited expansion, but it can also become an invitation to redefine prosperity.
The transition therefore requires reversing the direction of economic reasoning.
Instead of asking how nature can be adapted to the requirements of economic expansion, societies should ask how economic activity can be adapted to the regenerative capacity of nature.
This does not imply rejecting technology.
It means rejecting the belief that technology can abolish finitude.
Water and Páramos as a Frontier of Intergenerational Survival
This discussion acquires particular concreteness in páramo territories.
A páramo is not simply a territory available to be allocated among mining, agriculture, infrastructure, conservation, or other economic uses. It is an ecological system whose hydrological and biological functions exceed any immediate monetary valuation.
The water regulated by an ecosystem does not necessarily have a price proportional to its importance for life. Biodiversity does not necessarily appear as a balance-sheet asset. The capacity of an ecosystem to retain and regulate water over long periods is not adequately recorded as economic wealth. And damage to an ecological system may become visible long after the activity that caused it has generated revenues and left the territory.
Here a decisive temporal asymmetry emerges.
Extraction can generate economic value within months or years.
Ecological regeneration may require decades, centuries, or, under certain circumstances, prove impossible.
Intergenerational justice should therefore not be understood merely as an ethical concern. It is also a question of economic architecture.
An economy that obtains present benefits by reducing future ecological wealth is materially transferring wealth across generations.
From this perspective, protecting páramos and water sources is not a romantic opposition to economic development. It is a defense of the ecological infrastructure that makes any future development possible.
Conservation is not the absence of an economy.
It is the material condition of possibility for a future economy.
From the Energy Transition to Ecological Sovereignty
The energy question also has a geopolitical dimension.
Historically, a substantial part of global economic growth has depended upon the intensive appropriation of natural resources located in peripheral territories. The energy transition may reproduce this structure if demand for strategic minerals shifts new extractive pressures toward territories in the Global South.
A new international division of nature may therefore emerge.
Some territories concentrate technologies, capital, and consumption.
Others concentrate extraction, pollution, biodiversity loss, and territorial conflict.
A genuinely just energy transition cannot be limited to changing the energy source consumed in economic centers. It must also transform the territorial relations through which the materials required to sustain that energy are obtained.
Here a question emerges that goes beyond conventional energy policy:
Who has the power to decide which territories may be sacrificed, which resources may be extracted, and which ecological limits must be respected?
The answer cannot remain exclusively in the hands of markets, financial centers, or knowledge systems that transform nature into a resource before recognizing it as a condition of existence.
Sovereignty therefore acquires an ecological and epistemological dimension.
A territory that loses its water sources, regulatory ecosystems, and critical biodiversity also loses part of its capacity for future self-determination.
Protecting water, páramos, forests, soils, and hydrological systems is therefore a form of intergenerational security.
A Final Reflection: From Power over Nature to Responsibility for Life
The energy transition will be one of the decisive tests of whether humanity is genuinely moving beyond the culture of power.
If renewable technologies are used merely to preserve unlimited material expansion, technological transition may occur without genuine civilizational transition.
But if the energy transition becomes part of a broader movement toward sufficiency, reciprocity, care, and regeneration, it can become an opportunity to redefine what it means to prosper.
The question, therefore, is not whether humanity can find another source of energy.
Humanity has repeatedly demonstrated its capacity to do so.
The more difficult question is whether humanity can learn to live without treating every limit as an enemy.
The future of energy is inseparable from the future of culture.
A civilization organized around extraction asks:
How much more can we take?
A civilization organized around regeneration asks:
What must we preserve so that life can continue?
The first question belongs to the culture of power.
The second belongs to the culture of limits.
But between them lies a deeper question:
Who has the power to define limits, who produces the knowledge that legitimizes them, and who decides which territories, waters, ecosystems, and forms of life may be sacrificed in the name of development?
If these decisions continue to be determined primarily by financial centers, dominant technologies, and knowledge systems that transform nature into a resource before recognizing it as a condition of existence, the energy transition risks reproducing the very structure of power it claims to overcome.
This leads to a question that transcends the energy transition:
Can a culture of limits become a Sovereign Code capable of recovering for communities, territories, and future generations the capacity to determine what must be preserved, what may be used, and what must never be sacrificed in the name of growth?
This question opens a field of inquiry in which sovereignty is understood not merely as a legal or state capacity to decide, but as an epistemological, territorial, and collective capacity to produce the criteria through which a society determines the limits of its own intervention in the conditions of life.
Perhaps the challenge of post-growth is not simply to learn how to consume less.
Perhaps it is to recover the capacity to decide what we are not willing to destroy.
That capacity to decide may constitute the first principle of a Sovereign Code: a framework for shifting rationality from the appropriation of nature toward the preservation of the material, territorial, and epistemological conditions that make life possible.
The transition, ultimately, would not be merely energetic.
It would be a transition from power to limits, from extraction to regeneration, and from epistemological dependency toward sovereignty over the conditions of life.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Luis Antonio González Santos is Associate Professor of Public Administration and Accounting, Faculty of Economic Sciences, National University of Colombia, and director of the Accounting Observatory. His research focuses on critical accounting, environmental governance, and sustainability, with an emphasis on the genealogical method. He has contributed to international debates on education for sustainability and socio-ecological transitions.
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