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    Ideas to Postpone the End of the World
    Ideas to Postpone the End of the World
    Ideas to Postpone the End of the World
    Ebook50 pages39 minutes

    Ideas to Postpone the End of the World

    By Ailton Krenak

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    • Environmentalism

    • Sustainability

    • Indigenous Culture

    • Cultural Preservation

    • Noble Savage

    • Wise Old Man

    • Chosen One

    • Wise Old Mentor

    • Corrupt Politician

    • Power of Dreams

    • Loss of Innocence

    • Apocalypse

    • Oppressed Minority

    • Corrupt Corporation

    About this ebook

    “Ailton Krenak’s ideas inspire, washing over you with every truth-telling sentence. Read this book.” — Tanya Talaga, bestselling author of Seven Fallen Feathers

    Indigenous peoples have faced the end of the world before. Now, humankind is on a collective march towards the abyss. Global pandemics, extreme weather, and massive wildfires define this era many now call the Anthropocene.

    From Brazil comes Ailton Krenak, renowned Indigenous activist and leader, who demonstrates that our current environmental crisis is rooted in society’s flawed concept of “humanity” — that human beings are superior to other forms of nature and are justified in exploiting it as we please.

    To stop environmental disaster, Krenak argues that we must reject the homogenizing effect of this perspective and embrace a new form of “dreaming” that allows us to regain our place within nature. In Ideas to Postpone the End of the World, he shows us the way. 

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherAnansi International
    Release dateOct 6, 2020
    ISBN9781487008529
    Author

    Ailton Krenak

    AILTON KRENAK was born in Minas Gerais, Brazil, in the Krenak homelands along the Doce River Valley, a region where mining operations have severely affected the ecology. A socio-environmental activist and campaigner for Indigenous rights, he organized the Alliance of Forest Peoples, which unites riverine and Indigenous communities throughout the Amazon. He has consistently been one of the best-known campaigners in the movement set in motion by the Indigenous Awakening in the 1970s and was a key figure in the formation of the Union of Indigenous Nations (UIN), which brought together 180 different Indigenous groups across the country in a unified front to push for rights. In his capacity as a journalist, producing videos and making television appearances, he has pursued an educational and environmental agenda. His struggles in the 1970s and 1980s were instrumental in the inclusion of Chapter VIII of the Brazilian Constitution (1988), which guaranteed Indigenous rights to their ancestral homelands and traditional cultures — on paper at least. He was co-author of the UNESCO proposal that led to the creation of the Serra do Espinhaço Biosphere Reserve in 2005, and remains a member of its managing committee. He was awarded the Order of Cultural Merit by the President of the Republic in 2016, and holds an honorary doctorate from the Federal University of Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais. He is the author of two previous books, and was recently featured in the Netflix documentary series Guerras do Brasil.doc (Wars of Brazil).

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      Book preview

      Ideas to Postpone the End of the World - Ailton Krenak

      Introduction

      Tomorrow Is Not for Sale

      April 2020. The rhythm of life today is not the same as it was last week, or last summer, or in January or February. The world is in suspension. And I don’t know if we’re going to come out of this crisis the same as we went in. The future is here and now, and there may not be a next year.

      I’ve stopped going out, cancelled all commitments. I’m with my family at the Krenak village, which is located along the Middle Doce River. Due to the rapid global spread of the novel coronavirus, COVID-19, our Indigenous reserve has been in isolation for almost a month. The truth is we’ve been corralled here for a long time, refugees in our own homeland, on a four-thousand-hectare reserve (which would be a lot larger, if justice were served). This involuntary confinement has given Indigenous people resilience, made us more resistant. I planted corn this morning. I planted a tree.

      We at Krenak village have been mourning our Doce River for decades now, watching it defiled by industrial and agricultural pollution, deformed by hydroelectric stations, and, more recently, choked with toxic mud from a burst tailings dam. I wasn’t expecting the world to make us grieve for something else too. For a long time, it was us, the Indigenous peoples, who were on the verge of seeing our ways of life driven to extinction. Today, everyone, without exception, is facing the imminent collapse of the earth under our collective weight. We’re witnessing the unfolding of a tragedy, of people dying all over the globe in such numbers that corpses are being taken to the incinerators by the truckload.

      This virus is discriminating against humanity. Just look around. Nature’s getting on with nature. The bitter melon grows just as it always has in my garden. The virus isn’t killing birds, bears, or any other creature; just us, humans. It’s humankind and our artificial world that has gone into a tailspin. The virus, a natural organism, is attacking the unsustainable way of life we chose for ourselves — this fantastic freedom we so love to demand, but which comes at a cost no one thought to consider.

      Some governments think that the economy can’t stop, even though people are going to die, there’s no avoiding it.¹ The other day, the president of the Republic said that Brazilians have privileged immunity to disease, because they walk through sewage every day and don’t catch a thing.² What Jair Bolsonaro has been doing can only be called necropolitics — death as policy. It’s a sick mentality that is spreading worldwide. It devalues life, but also the power of the word. Because to make such a declaration is to issue a death sentence, whether to someone of advanced years or to their children or grandchildren, but always to someone who loves and is loved.

      In Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish, the French philosopher says that the market society we live in considers the individual useful only so long as he or she is productive. With the advancement of capitalism, instruments were created to let us live and to make us die: once people stop producing, they become dispensable. Either you produce the conditions to keep yourself alive, or you produce the conditions to usher in your death. For governments,

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