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“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can measure the effect of a vehicle in Sao Paulo, but it does not include the effect of missiles fired at Ukraine and Gaza. Could it be that a missile has no effect on the climate?” Ailton Krenak – thinker, artist and one of the greatest natural spokesmen of Brazil’s indigenous peoples – speaks with an enveloping voice. Gently express strong criticism. “COP30 is being emptied by the powers that wage war. Those who govern the world are the ones who possess the weapons. War moves the economy”, he says in a hotel in Sao Paulo near the exhibition dedicated to his artistic and intellectual production in Cultural Itaú.
Krenak, as he is affectionately known in Brazil, is pessimistic about COP30 being held in Belém between November 10 and 21, for the first time in the Amazon biome. It won’t be a sign of protest. He doesn’t want his name associated with the COP. He is particularly critical of the oil exploitation that the Brazilian government has just authorized near the mouth of the Amazon River: “After removing millions of barrels of oil at the mouth of the Amazon River, there will be no possible energy transition, it will be a disaster,” he states firmly, directly accusing Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, president of Brazil.
The moral authority of Ailton Krenak (Itabirinha de Mantena, 72 years old) is the result of an accumulation of prestige. If he had not given a performative speech to the Brazilian Congress on September 4, 1987, while painting his face with the jenipapo fruit as a sign of mourning, indigenous rights would not be protected by the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. Deputies and senators, mesmerized by his white suit and blackface, paid attention. The media dedicated their covers to him. And the amendment to the draft Constitution prepared by the União dos Povos Indígenas (UNI), an organization he helped found, was accepted. Krenak’s voice wouldn’t resonate as much if some of his books, Ideas to postpone the end of the world (2021) e Ancestral future (2025), they were not improve sellers.
Now, Brazil’s most influential indigenous thinker is denouncing the commercialization of the United Nations climate conference. “COP30 was hijacked from an economic perspective. Climate became a market. COP left ecology aside and adopted an environmental services perspective,” says Krenak. In his opinion, it is urgent to create a new treaty between man and what used to be called nature: “Environmentalism has become so worn out because it insisted on putting man at the center and the rest in the environment,” he clarifies. He suggests that instead of holding climate conferences, “a large meeting should be convened to discuss the ecology of the planet and the crisis in the relationship between humans and other non-human organisms.”
Ailton Krenak, whose ethnicity originates from the south-east of Brazil, is extremely worried about the devastation of the Amazon: “It is part of a very sensitive organism. If it suffers irreparable damage and reaches the point of no return, the consequences will be global. The rainfall and climate regulation phenomena of the planet will be altered.” Krenak also calls for an end to the exploitation of fossil fuels. “We don’t fully understand the need for a transition in the way the entire planet produces,” he says.
According to him, the exploitation of oil at the mouth of the Amazon River would be disastrous: “It means making a transition later, destroying the planet now. It would lead us directly to a dystopia, to a monumental disaster with no return.” Krenak holds President Lula directly responsible, who, in his opinion, pressured the Brazilian Institute of the Environment (Ibama) to speed up environmental licensing for the oil extraction project: “We live in a presidential regime. The president is the one who makes the decisions,” he underlines.
Urgent solutions
Krenak is a survivor. His people, one of the most persecuted in history. After a succession of massacres and persecutions, they ended up settling in the Doce river valley, in the state of Minas Gerais. The arrival in 1942 of the mining company Companhia Vale do Rio Doce – currently Vale, the largest iron producer in the world – contaminated the river and ended up devastating a region already affected by cattle ranching. In 1969, the military dictatorship built the Reformatório Krenak, a concentration camp for indigenous people from all over Brazil, on its lands. His family fled to the state of Paraná, further south. The Krenak, with their lands occupied and plundered, were on the verge of disappearing.
When its population was climbing back to 434 individuals in 2014, the tragedies of the Mariana (2015) and Brumadinho (2019) dam breaches occurred. Tons of toxic material ravaged the Doce River, which, in the words of Ailton Krenak, left him in a coma.
After having resided for decades in large cities such as São Paulo or Belo Horizonte, where he worked dedicated to the indigenous movement, Ailton lives again in the village of Krenak, near the municipality of Resplendor. Next to his Watu, his river, with one foot on the ground. When Krenak addresses the planetary crisis, he slightly tenses the pace of his speech: “70% of the planet’s natural soil cover is already narcotized, poisoned. To produce you have to inject poison. What makes the seed germinate is no longer the drive for life, but the poison, just like a person who takes drugs to walk,” he says.
Krenak argues that the commercial logic of cities is contaminating everything: “There is a colonialist tendency of the city. It’s as if (the city) is trying to solve the problems of a place that actually has other needs and doesn’t want the market to infiltrate the daily lives of its communities. The city poisons relationships.”
As an antidote to citizenship, which according to him has a colonial weight, Krenak proposes the concept of floristry. “The forest was considered a non-place. It was necessary to cut down the forest, open a clearing, produce a city, a country in order to have citizenship”, says the thinker. For this reason he suggests a beneficial exchange between forest and city: “Whoever lives in the forest (in the jungle) claims a type of citizenship that is florestans. Those who live in the city, already exhausted, demand to forest “So we have something in common.”
the book Ancestral future We start from an image that makes visible the circular time shared by most indigenous cultures. A group of children from the Yudjá ethnic group row a canoe on the Xingu River, a tributary of the Amazon River. “Our parents say we are already getting closer to what it was like in the past,” says the eldest. In the pages, the writer argues that Western culture has specialized in the projection of unlikely futures.
Krenak considers the future a true white man’s fraud: “There is only the present. If we are not able to give an answer to the present, we will then receive something that we will call the future with the defects of what we have not been able to fix and take care of,” he argues, underlining every word. He doesn’t even consider the idea of utopia useful. “They create utopias because they don’t have the courage to face the present. If they made an effort, they would produce answers for the present. Bringing that possible vision to the present would mean giving up the reproductive machine of capitalism,” he says.
And commit to caring for and cultivating the present. Against all odds, crises and tides, he maintains a glimmer of hope. If in yours performance Krenak, a voter in 1987, was confident in the possibility of building a society that respects the weakest, in his speech holding the number 5 chair of the Brazilian Academy of Letters in 2024, he underlined the importance of resilience, of returning healing and kindness to the world and of helping to reconstitute the community fabric.
To postpone the end of the world, ask for concrete and urgent solutions. “If we don’t make profound changes in the way life on the planet is produced and reproduced, we will all go to hell. Humans are at the top of the list of endangered species. Let’s focus on the practical. Rivers are drying up, deserts are expanding, and glaciers are melting. Either we are a living organism on a living planet. Or we are a sick person on a sick planet.”
