Ideas to Postpone the End of the World

Every time the news talks about saving humanity, it is worth asking who exactly they are talking about. Ailton Krenak points out that Western thought invented humanity as an exclusive club, restricted to those who consume and live by the rules of the urban market. This group came to see itself as the pinnacle of creation, separate from nature, treating the Earth as a stage for its whims.

This division gave rise to anthropocentrism, an attitude in which rivers and forests lose their intrinsic value and become disposable raw material. By pulling away from the living web in which all species coexist, our society digs an abyss that threatens life itself in this age of the Anthropocene.

In everyday urban life, this estrangement is obvious. Anyone spending hours on a crowded bus between the outskirts of town and work barely sets foot on fertile soil, surrounded instead by asphalt. That routine reinforces the illusion that food sprouts on supermarket shelves and water is born in the faucet, erasing our dependence on natural cycles.

The contemporary machine validates people by how much they produce and spend. Anyone without a good credit score or a steady formal job ends up pushed to the margins of social invisibility. Krenak denounces how the economy has stripped community life of its intrinsic dignity, replacing the concept of the full citizen with the figure of the voracious consumer.

To feed this insatiable machine, unchecked extractivism tears open mountain ranges in search of ore, burns forests, and drains entire watersheds. The goal is not to meet basic needs, but to manufacture artificial scarcities around the clock, generating short-lived goods that turn into trash within a few weeks.

Everyday workers know this cycle firsthand when they buy things on credit in monthly installments just to keep up an artificial standard of living. The commodification of every minute turns rest time into anxiety over productivity, hollowing out warm human connection in exchange for disposable objects.

In 2015, the collapse of the Mariana dam dumped millions of cubic meters of toxic mud into the Doce River basin. For government authorities and mining companies, the tragedy was handled in accounting terms: financial losses, environmental fines, and a water resource temporarily suspended for industries and the sanitation systems of neighboring towns.

For the Krenak people, who live along the banks of this waterway and call it Watu, the impact was something else entirely. Watu was never a mere utilitarian channel; he is a revered ancestor, a loving grandfather who taught generations how to fish and dream. The mud represented the criminal poisoning of a living relative, who fell into a coma right before his people's eyes.

This contrast reveals the author's critique. When nature is felt as family, pollution stops being a risk calculation and becomes a moral assault. As long as cities treat waters as tradable inventories, ecological disasters will be seen merely as operating costs calculated on spreadsheets.