Let’s get one thing clear: Ailton Krenak is not here to sell you hope. He is not your guru, your greenwashing mascot, or a TED talk in feathers. What he offers instead is far more dangerous: clarity.

At 71, this Indigenous philosopher, poet, and political firebrand has spent decades refusing to play the game of polite despair. While the West rages about AI revolutions and space tourism, Krenak calmly reminds us that the Earth is still alive—and increasingly furious. His book Ancestral Future, also available in English, is less a collection of essays than a gentle earthquake. A slow, shaking undoing of everything we’ve been told about development, progress, and the destiny of “civilization.”

Because here’s the twist: the future we’ve been sold is a lie. And deep down, we all know it.

The Planet Has a Fever. Growth Is the Disease.

Krenak doesn’t mourn the apocalypse—he diagnoses it. The planet is not collapsing because of some abstract failure of technology or policy. It’s collapsing because modernity is a cult of overproduction. A mechanical hallucination where the point of life is to own, consume, and control everything—even time itself.

The problem is not that we’ve lost our way. It’s that we’ve paved over every path that didn’t lead to profit.

In Ancestral Future, Krenak proposes a radical reframing. Climate change isn’t just an environmental issue—it’s a spiritual fracture, a civilizational breakdown, a planetary divorce. We cut ties with the living Earth and replaced them with a shopping mall. Every river turned into a utility. Every forest a spreadsheet. Every child, a future worker programmed to dream in GDP.

But nature is not a resource. It’s not “the environment.” It’s a relative we ghosted. And now, it’s writing back.

Buen Vivir, Not Big Tech

There’s a quiet revolution humming in the Andean mountains. Not in labs, but in language. The Quechua concept of sumaq kawsay—translated as buen vivir, or “good living”—refuses the central myth of the West: that more is better, that happiness can be manufactured, that growth is sacred.

Krenak doesn’t just admire this worldview; he inhabits it. In his writing, the land is never silent. Trees have opinions. Rivers hold grudges. Mountains remember. This isn’t metaphor—it’s worldview. Or, more precisely, cosmovision. A way of being that doesn’t put Homo sapiens at the center of the cosmos like some clingy protagonist with main-character syndrome.

In contrast, the West’s model of progress looks increasingly like a casino on fire. Economic development, he argues, has metastasized into something grotesque—an industry that invests more in war than water, more in satellites than seeds. We are told to trust the system, even as the system melts glaciers and commodifies every last inch of meaning.

Throw Out the Drawers

Modern life is a drawer. Or a series of them. Full of things we don’t need, bought with money we don’t have, to impress people we don’t like. Krenak gently suggests we try something else: only what is necessary. A radical idea in a world addicted to excess.

He’s not nostalgic for a simpler past. He’s pointing to an alternative present—one that’s always existed, just outside the shopping mall. A world where living doesn’t require extraction, where knowledge isn’t patented, where the future isn’t something to manufacture, but something to live into. Not the future as endless innovation, but as ecological intimacy. As affection. As care.

Imagine a world without drawers. A world where the child makes her own toy. Where the river is not an asset but an ancestor. Where the algorithm is replaced by attention. Where you are not a user—but a participant in the great entanglement of life.

Apocalypse Fatigue Is Real

If you’re exhausted, that’s not an accident. The future, as it’s marketed to us, is terrifying. And boring. A Black Mirror episode on loop: infinite work, infinite surveillance, infinite scroll.

Krenak isn’t immune to that fatigue. But he insists we name the feeling for what it is: grief for a world we were never meant to inhabit. What hurts isn’t just the climate crisis—it’s the poverty of imagination. The inability to conceive of a future not curated by Silicon Valley or ruined by Wall Street.

And yet, he insists, there are exits. They just don’t look like what we’ve been taught to expect. The next revolution won’t be engineered—it will be remembered. It will come through affection, not algorithms. Through the wild return of values we tried to erase: restraint, slowness, reciprocity, the sacred.

The Sacred Is Political

Krenak’s rebellion isn’t just philosophical—it’s poetic insurgency. To speak of rivers as kin, to see time as circular, to dance with the Earth instead of drilling it—that is resistance. That is refusal. That is punk.

His book is a love letter to the more-than-human world, but also a critique of everything that got us here: the lie of endless growth, the gospel of extraction, the psychosis of ownership. If there’s one heresy modernity cannot tolerate, it’s the idea that life is not a product. That not everything must be useful. That some things—like rivers, like forests, like joy—just are.

The Ancestral Future Isn’t Far Away. It’s Beneath Our Feet.

Krenak closes his eyes and sees water flowing from the mountains. He sees himself dissolving into it. He becomes the stream. The soil. The breath of trees. In this vision, the future is not some distant destination. It’s here. Now. Already sprouting.

This is not mysticism. It’s methodology.

The ancestral future is not about going back. It’s about returning to what was never fully lost. The wild memory of being part of a living world. The subversive joy of not knowing. The strength to stop.

We may not deserve a second chance. But if the Earth is still willing to negotiate, Ailton Krenak says we should show up barefoot, with open palms, and start listening again.

Before it’s too late.