The intensive presence of the idea of limits in the discussion on environmental politics should not be a surprise if one attends to some of its intellectual roots. The critique of the idea of nature’s total availability in contemporary political thought finds clear antecedents in different critical views of the primacy of instrumental rationality and, in general, of the hybris that usually accompanies the Enlightenment ideas of progress. The phenomenon of human immoderation or excess grasped by the notion of hybris since Ancient Greece would have taken in the context of modern science a new and radicalized impulse, opening unimaginable possibilities of manipulation and destruction.