A couple of days ago I went to a seminar by Leonardo Boff, a leading figure in the liberation theology movement and recipient of the Alternative Nobel “Right Livelihood Award” in 2001. He now thinks and writes about ecology and spirituality and calls for a paradigm shift for humanity to find back to living with nature instead of just using it.

His talk was very inspiring and underlined the need for an approach that is not just rebuilding our economic system, but that changes some fundamental characteristics of it. Given the extractive logic of the “maximize profit” model, an interesting comparison he made stuck in my head:

[Economic] growth behaves like cancer cells. They grow and grow until they have destroyed the whole body.