Part 1 ~ Critical Review
The previous issue of Mother Pelican offers a broad and politically incisive reading of the contemporary civilizational crisis. Its overarching thesis is that the transition from a growth-oriented economy to a post-growth scenario will be neither just nor peaceful as long as population growth, material consumption, and a political culture based on domination persist. The issue organizes its contributions around the see–judge–act sequence, a method that transforms ecological diagnosis into ethical deliberation and, ultimately, a political demand.
Mother Pelican’s editorial orientation explicitly links social and ecological justice with solidarity, integral human development, and the spiritual dimensions of sustainability. Within this framework, the issue does not address ecological collapse as an isolated technical problem, but as a crisis of civilization, knowledge, power, and meaning.
1. See: Diagnosing the Crisis
The first section brings together texts describing the historical, energy-related, technological, and cultural conditions that structure the crisis. The concept of the “new human being,” the transition from an extractive culture to a regenerative one, and the discussion of who will program the next era shift the analysis away from technology and toward the forms of subjectivity and authority that guide its use.
The article “Beyond the Energy Transition: From a Culture of Extraction to a Culture of Regeneration” is particularly relevant because it challenges the idea that the energy transition can be achieved simply by replacing one energy source with another. The problem is not merely technical but civilizational: a society may partially abandon fossil fuels while retaining the extractive logic that turns territories, bodies, data, and knowledge into available resources.
This critique connects with “Who Will Code the Next Era? Accounting, Post-Growth, and the Struggle for Epistemic Sovereignty”. Including accounting in the post-growth debate is significant because it shows that economic transitions also depend on systems of measurement, classification, and valuation. Accounting does not merely record a pre-existing reality; it helps produce what organizations and governments consider visible, relevant, and manageable.
From this perspective, the problem is not solely how to calculate environmental costs more accurately, but who defines what counts as a cost, benefit, loss, progress, or sustainability. Epistemic sovereignty refers precisely to the capacity of peoples and territories to participate in defining the criteria through which their reality is represented. This question engages with the author’s critical research trajectory on the relationship between accounting, power, and social emancipation.
Texts on technological entropy, material limits, and declining resource availability introduce a decisive warning: digitalization and innovation do not eliminate the materiality of the economy. Artificial intelligence, digital systems, and technological infrastructures require energy, minerals, water, labor, and logistics networks. An economy presented as immaterial can therefore intensify material forms of extraction.
Likewise, articles on the emergence of hierarchical societies, cross-party politics of limits, and integral human development broaden the diagnosis. The ecological crisis is linked to power institutions, imaginaries of superiority, social inequalities, and reductionist conceptions of the human being. The issue suggests that sustainability cannot be achieved if an anthropology centered on domination, unlimited expansion, and accumulation remains in place.
2. Judge: Interpreting the Structures
The JUDGING section turns diagnosis into critical assessment. Its main concern is to understand the invisible structures that sustain industrial civilization, even when their destructive effects are widely known.
The text “Sacred Revolt: Why Reverence Should Precede Restraint” raises a fundamental ethical question: restraint cannot be sustained solely through external restrictions. For a society to accept ecological limits, it must change its values, desires, and relationship with nature. Reverence, understood as recognition of the intrinsic value of life and ecological interdependence, would precede institutional regulation.
However, this argument calls for critical caution. Cultural transformation is necessary, but not sufficient. There is a risk of turning the environmental crisis into a problem of individual consciousness and obscuring the differentiated responsibilities of corporations, states, economic elites, and social groups with unequal levels of consumption. An ethic of restraint must be complemented by policies of redistribution, regulation, and historical accountability.
Articles on the invisible structures of industrial civilization and the reversal of scarcities help dismantle the appearance that the economic system is autonomous. Scarcity is not simply a natural fact: it can be produced, managed, and distributed unequally. Similarly, what is presented as technological abundance may depend on transferring costs to peripheral territories, precarious workers, and future generations.
The critique of artificial intelligence deepens this argument. AI’s expansion is often presented as a clean, efficient, and dematerialized revolution, yet its operation depends on energy infrastructure, mineral extraction, data centers, labor chains, and corporate concentration. The question is not only what AI can do, but which social, ecological, and geopolitical relations make its development possible.
From a critical accounting perspective, this dimension is central: information systems can record certain impacts while excluding others. When ecological and social costs are left out of financial statements, they do not disappear; they are simply transferred to communities, ecosystems, and collective futures. Accounting omissions can thus function as a form of institutional invisibilization.
3. Act: Responses and Tensions
The third section seeks to move from diagnosis to action. Its articles address anthropogenic collapse, world population, the commons, climate policy, preparation for scenarios of disruption, and the risks of technological totalitarianism.
The proposal to halve the world’s population is one of the issue’s most problematic points. Although it stems from a legitimate concern about ecological limits, it requires rigorous ethical and political scrutiny. The relationship between population, consumption, and sustainability cannot be formulated abstractly, since environmental impact is distributed profoundly unequally. Populations with lower historical consumption cannot be held responsible in the same way as economies and social classes with greater capacity for extraction and emissions.
A just population policy should reject all forms of coercion and focus on education, public health, gender equality, reproductive rights, poverty reduction, and redistribution of material consumption. Otherwise, the language of sustainability could reproduce a biopolitical logic in which certain populations are treated as surplus or as threats.
The text on the Himalayas and the commons introduces a particularly valuable territorial perspective. Shared ecosystems cannot be adequately protected through fragmented national decisions. They require cooperative institutions, differentiated responsibilities, and participation by the communities that inhabit these territories. This issue applies to watersheds, forests, oceans, biodiversity, and the atmosphere.
For its part, “The Benefits of Preparing for Collapse” raises a pragmatic question: preparing for scenarios of collapse may be reasonable even if they never fully materialize. Preparation can take the form of stronger communities, food sovereignty, care networks, reduced dependencies, and democratic response capacities. Nevertheless, collapse discourse can also produce fatalism, isolation, or militarization. Its value depends on whether it is directed toward cooperation rather than individualistic survival.
Finally, the text on technological totalitarianism warns that responses to the crisis could consolidate new forms of surveillance, control, and algorithmic governance. An ecological transition without democracy could replace extractive domination with technocratic domination. Sustainability must therefore be assessed not only by its environmental outcomes, but also by the procedures through which decisions are made, implemented, and their costs distributed.
4. Critical Assessment
The issue’s main strength is its interdisciplinary character. It connects energy, population, accounting, artificial intelligence, spirituality, institutional power, human development, and the commons. This breadth helps explain why the ecological crisis has no single cause and cannot be resolved through a single public policy.
The decision to organize the texts around the see–judge–act sequence is also important. This structure prevents knowledge from being separated from responsibility. Seeing involves producing a diagnosis; judging requires establishing ethical and political criteria; acting means turning reflection into institutional and collective transformation.
The main limitation lies in the heterogeneity of the proposals. Some contributions appear to favor cultural and spiritual transformation; others emphasize degrowth, preparation for collapse, or technological regulation. These perspectives do not always share the same assumptions about democracy, population, authority, and distributive justice.
Moreover, the issue should be read critically to avoid three risks:
Presenting the transition to post-growth as an inevitable and homogeneous process.
Reducing the crisis to a problem of overpopulation without considering unequal consumption.
Relying on moral transformation without changing the economic, financial, accounting, and political structures that produce extraction.
Conclusion
The issue makes a relevant contribution to contemporary debates on social and ecological justice by arguing that the crisis of growth is not merely economic or environmental: it is also epistemological, political, ethical, and civilizational. Its main contribution is to show that an energy or technological transition will be insufficient unless it transforms the culture of extraction, power hierarchies, and knowledge systems that legitimize unlimited expansion.
The inclusion of accounting and epistemic sovereignty significantly broadens the debate. The decisive question is not simply how to make the existing system sustainable, but who defines sustainability, which realities are accounted for, and which forms of life are excluded from dominant criteria of value. In this sense, post-growth could be just only if it is built through redistribution, democratic participation, epistemological pluralism, and recognition of ecological limits.
The transition will be peaceful only if it abandons the logic of imposition and becomes a process of collective deliberation. Reducing consumption is not enough: the social relations that allow some groups to consume, decide, and accumulate while others bear the ecological costs of that model must also be transformed.
Part 2 ~ Spiritual Dimension
The spiritual dimension constitutes one of the deepest themes of the issue, although it is not always expressed in explicitly religious language. Its role is to interrogate the desires, values, imaginaries, and forms of relationship that sustain the civilization of growth. From this perspective, the ecological crisis is not merely a crisis of energy, resources, or institutions; it is also a crisis of meaning, belonging, and human self-understanding.
Recent literature on integral sustainability argues that the spiritual dimension must be articulated with the ecological, social, and economic dimensions, since the socio-environmental crisis may express a deeper cultural and spiritual crisis. In this framework, spirituality is not necessarily equivalent to institutional religion; it refers to the convictions, dispositions, and experiences through which people recognize value, interdependence, responsibility, and limits.
1. From Domination to Belonging
The central spiritual premise of the issue is its critique of the separation between humanity and nature. Extractive culture assumes that the external world is a reservoir of resources available for human expansion. Regenerative culture, by contrast, requires understanding that human beings are part of ecological networks that they do not fully control.
This transformation can be expressed as a shift:
From nature as object to the Earth as a community of life.
From an available resource to a gift received and shared.
From unilateral domination to reciprocity.
From unlimited accumulation to sufficiency.
From individual self-sufficiency to interdependence.
From quantitative growth to integral flourishing.
The article on the transition from a culture of extraction to a culture of regeneration thus acquires a specific spiritual depth. Regeneration means not only restoring degraded ecosystems; it also means rebuilding a human relationship with the world based on care, humility, and responsibility. Integral sustainability specifically proposes moving from a mindset of control and exploitation toward co-creative participation in living systems.
2. Reverence and Limits
The text “Sacred Revolt: Why Reverence Should Precede Restraint” clearly articulates the issue’s spiritual thesis: ecological limits cannot be maintained exclusively through prohibitions, taxes, or surveillance mechanisms. An inner disposition is needed that recognizes that not everything technically possible is morally desirable.
Reverence introduces three shifts:
1. Ontological shift: nature is no longer regarded as a reality without intrinsic value.
2. Ethical shift: freedom is no longer understood as an unlimited capacity to consume, but as responsibility.
3. Political shift: public decisions must consider those who have no direct voice, including future peoples, nonhuman species, and ecosystems.
Reverence should not be confused with a passive or contemplative attitude. It can become a foundation for political action when it leads to the protection of what is considered valuable. Research on spirituality and climate change emphasizes that inner transformation can foster a “spiral of compassion” and strengthen responsibility toward living systems.
However, reverence cannot replace justice. An ecological spirituality that admires nature but ignores poverty, labor exploitation, or territorial dispossession would be incomplete. The integral ecology approach insists that environmental degradation and social degradation are part of the same crisis.
3. The Spiritual Critique of Growth
Unlimited economic growth is not merely a productive model; it is also a secularized spiritual promise. It offers fulfillment through acquisition, security through accumulation, and recognition through consumption. In this way, the market organizes not only the production of goods but also the production of desires.
The issue challenges this imaginary by proposing a transition toward post-growth. The spiritual question is not simply how much consumption should be reduced, but what conception of life makes increasing consumption appear to be a condition of happiness.
From this angle, the spirituality of post-growth can be understood as a search for sufficiency. Sufficiency does not mean imposed poverty or indiscriminate renunciation of well-being. It means distinguishing between:
What is necessary for a dignified life.
What is conducive to collective well-being.
What is superfluous and produced by competition and status.
What is destructive, even when profitable or socially prestigious.
The idea of “being more and having less” is associated with an ethical and spiritual consciousness that values life, compassion, humility, beauty, and care above material accumulation. Consequently, post-growth requires changing not only economic indicators but also cultural criteria of success.
4. Accounting and Inner Life
The spiritual dimension also makes it possible to deepen the connection between accounting and sustainability. Modern accounting is often presented as an objective technique, but every measurement presupposes a decision about what deserves to be counted. That decision has a normative and, ultimately, spiritual dimension: it expresses what a society considers valuable.
When an accounting system prioritizes financial profitability and excludes social suffering, ecosystem depletion, or the loss of community autonomy, it is not acting neutrally. It is institutionalizing a particular worldview: one in which economic value can replace ecological, cultural, and human value.
Spirituality raises questions that conventional accounting often leaves aside:
What forms of life must not be sacrificed for profitability?
What obligations do we have to future generations?
How can an irreparable loss be accounted for?
Can an ecosystem be treated solely as an asset?
What responsibility exists toward those who do not participate in the decision?
What does it mean to prosper when prosperity destroys the conditions for life?
In this sense, epistemic sovereignty is not merely a methodological issue. It also entails recovering the collective capacity to define what deserves care and what cannot be reduced to a price. Accounting oriented toward post-growth would have to recognize relational, ecological, community, and cultural values that cannot be adequately translated into monetary terms.
5. Spirituality and Justice
A rigorous spiritual dimension must be linked to social justice. It is not enough to promote inner peace, contemplation, or connection with nature if social structures continue to produce dispossession and exclusion. Integral human development holds that the material, social, moral, and spiritual dimensions of life are interconnected, not separate.
Therefore, the spirituality of the issue can be interpreted through four requirements:
a. Intergenerational responsibility
Present decisions must assume obligations toward those who have not yet been born. Justice is no longer exclusively synchronic; it acquires a temporal dimension. Present accumulation cannot be justified if it destroys the conditions of existence of future generations.
b. Ecological solidarity
Solidarity should not be limited to human relationships. It should also extend to animals, forests, rivers, mountains, and the living systems on which social reproduction depends. This does not mean attributing exactly the same capacities or rights to nature as to people, but recognizing that human life is inseparable from its ecological web.
c. Preference for the vulnerable
The costs of the transition must not fall on poor populations, peripheral territories, or communities that have historically contributed less to the crisis. A spirituality that takes no position on inequality risks becoming a form of moral evasion.
d. Institutional transformation
Spirituality cannot remain in the private sphere. It must be expressed in public policies, forms of economic organization, accounting practices, educational systems, and technological decisions. Inner transformation must find institutional means of expression; otherwise, responsibility is reduced to individual virtue.
6. Risks of a Depoliticized Spirituality
The incorporation of spirituality into the sustainability debate also entails risks. The first is the individualization of the crisis. If the problem is explained as a lack of awareness, companies and economic structures may be exempted from responsibility.
The second is the romanticization of harmony. Not every community relationship is egalitarian, and not every spiritual tradition is ecologically emancipatory. Cultural practices must also be analyzed in terms of gender, class, ethnicity, and power relations.
The third is institutional appropriation. Organizations may use the language of purpose, well-being, or spiritual connection to enhance their legitimacy without transforming their extractive practices. In that case, spirituality becomes a reputational resource.
The fourth is cultural imposition. An ecological spirituality should not be presented as a universal doctrine that replaces existing Indigenous, peasant, community, or religious forms of knowledge. A decolonial perspective requires recognizing the plurality of cosmologies and preventing a particular conception of transcendence from being imposed as a global standard.
Therefore, the spiritual dimension must be critical, plural, situated, and politically responsible. Its value does not lie in offering an abstract solution to the crisis, but in contesting the cultural foundations that make unlimited exploitation possible.
Interpretive Synthesis
The spirituality of the issue can be defined as a pedagogy of sufficiency, interdependence, and responsibility. Its aim is to transform the relationship between humanity, technology, the economy, and the Earth. It does not propose abandoning reason or politics, but complementing them through a transformation of the desires and values that guide collective action.
From this reading, the see–judge–act sequence acquires a spiritual meaning:
See means overcoming the blindness produced by growth, technocracy, and reductive accounting.
Judge means recovering criteria of value linked to dignity, justice, beauty, compassion, and ecological limits.
Act means translating this awareness into regenerative institutions, policies, and practices.
The spiritual dimension, therefore, is not an ornamental supplement to socio-environmental analysis. It is a dispute over the ultimate foundation of collective life: whether the Earth will be treated as a commodity or as a community of life; whether success will be measured by accumulation or integral flourishing; and whether freedom will be understood as the power to consume or as the capacity to care.
Specialized literature agrees that sustainability requires integrating the inner and outer dimensions of development, linking awareness, emotions, values, and action with social justice and ecological protection. The issue’s most important contribution lies precisely in suggesting that no transition will be truly just unless it transforms the moral imagination that sustains the civilization of growth.
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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