ABSTRACT
This last chapter is an opening rather than a conclusion. For even if we accepted the necessity of hard limits and agreed on renouncing growth, this would only open many other questions, beyond the good of human equality itself. What value, objective and subjective, are we prepared to grant the natural world, biodiversity, wilderness, in their usefulness and in their beauty? What good to us are the lives of other animals, wild and domesticated, and how many of them should exist versus how many of us? And as for us, what kind of relation shall we choose to have with the rest of the world, since only we, the humans, have a choice? In response to such questions, different individuals, and especially different cultures and civilizations, will manifest distinct preferences among which it will be necessary to arbitrate, hopefully through peaceful means. Competitive inegalitarian societies may find it more difficult to renounce growth than those that are more committed to an egalitarian ethos. But perhaps in the common confrontation with limits, those nations that have so far imposed their expansionist model will finally have to learn from those that have been left behind, and rediscover the traditions of wisdom modernity has all but forgotten.
