Sustainability perspectives require non-standard scientific and political reasoning, now more than ever. The lexicons of ecology and political economy articulate epistemic catego-ries and imaginaries in which humans and environments are in mutual relationship avoiding an exploitation logic of the former. We support these scenarios allow to grasp the disconti-nuities between the past and the present of the environmental movements, between the scientific ideals of modernity and the contemporary ones. The need to connect two oppos-ing styles of reasoning is progressing: the theme of the non-neutrality of science and the need for science based political judgments. In this previously unknown combination of science and society, the current democratic practices of "multilevel co-production" between researchers and active citizenship (citizen-science) mark realistic governance pathways of the planetary ecological crisis to which governments seem to have to face, sooner as possible.