Ideas to Postpone the End of the World

A short book by the Brazilian Indigenous leader of the Krenak people, adapted from talks and published in Portuguese in 2019; Anthony Doyle's English translation appeared in 2020. Krenak asks who belongs to the 'humanity' that modern societies speak of, and argues that the idea has worked like an exclusive club, leaving Indigenous peoples, the poor and the rest of nature outside. He criticises the habit of treating the earth as a resource separate from ourselves, and speaks of the Rio Doce, devastated by a mining dam collapse in 2015, as a grandfather of his people rather than a body of water. Indigenous peoples, he says, have already lived through the end of their world many times since colonisation. To postpone the end of the world, people should keep telling stories, dreaming and singing, and recover ways of living that see themselves as part of the earth rather than its owners.

It is a brief, direct Indigenous critique of the idea of humanity behind the environmental crisis, and an invitation to imagine other ways of living with the earth.