When I speak of humanity, I am not only talking about Homo sapiens. I am referring to a vast array of beings that we have always excluded. We hunt whales, we fin sharks, and we kill lions and hang them on walls to show that we are braver than them. I am also talking about the killing of all the other humans who we thought had nothing, and existed for the sole purpose of providing us with clothes, food, and shelter. We are the plague of the planet, a kind of giant amoeba. Throughout history, humans – or rather this exclusive club of humanity, which appears in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and in institutional protocols – have been devastating everything around them. It is as if they had elected a caste, named it humanity, and judged all those who are outside of it as sub-human. Not only the caiçaras, quilombolas, and Indigenous peoples, but all forms of life that we deliberately left by the wayside. And that “way” is progress: the notion that we are going somewhere. We assume that there is a horizon, that we are heading to it, and on the way, we drop everything that does not matter, everything that is left, sub-humanity – some of us are part of it.

It is amazing that this virus out there now is only affecting people. It was a fantastic trick by Earth as an organism to pull its teat out of our mouths and say, “Now breathe, I want to see you breathe.” This exposes how the kind of life that we have created became artificial, because at some point you will need a mask and a breathing apparatus, but that apparatus also depends on a hydroelectric dam or a nuclear power plant or some kind of power generator. And that generator may also fail, regardless of our ambition or intent. We are being reminded that we are so vulnerable that if air is cut off for a few minutes, we die. It doesn’t take a complex warfare system to extinguish this so-called humanity: it is extinguished as easily as mosquitoes in a room after repellent is sprayed. We humans are not all-powerful – the Earth declares it.

And if we are not all that great, we should have the experience of being alive beyond the technological apparatuses that we can invent. For example, think about the economy, which is an invisible thing, except for that “$” sign. Perhaps it is a fiction to say that if the economy does not fully function, we die. We could put all the leaders of the Central Bank in a giant safe and let them live there with their economy. You can’t eat money. This morning I saw a Native American from the council of elders of the Lakota people talking about the coronavirus pandemic. He is a man in his mid-seventies called Wakya Un Manee, also known as Vernon Foster. (Vernon is a typical American name, because when the settlers arrived in America, besides banning native languages, they also changed people’s names.) Quoting an ancestor, he said, “Only when the last tree has been cut down, the last fish been caught, and the last stream poisoned, will we realize we cannot eat money.”

Perhaps the very idea of humanity, this totality that we have learned to call humanity, will dissolve with the events that we are currently experiencing. If that is the case, what will happen to the guys – and there are only a few of them – who keep the world’s money? Maybe we can knock them off their feet. Because they need humanity, even if it is an illusion, to terrorize them every morning with the threat that the stock market will drop, that the market is panicked, that the dollar will rise. When all of that becomes meaningless – screw the dollar, to hell with the market! – then there will be no more room for such a concentration of power. Because only in certain environments can such concentration occur. Even pollution: what happens if it spreads out without being contained? The air becomes cleaner. Didn’t pollution in cities decrease when we slowed down? I believe that the illusion that there is a caste of humanoids holding the secret to the Holy Grail – gorging themselves on wealth while terrorizing the rest of the world – may eventually implode. Perhaps the most recent sign of that is how those billionaires are building a platform outside of the Earth where they could move and live. I don’t know exactly where, maybe Mars. We should say: “Go on, just leave and forget about us!” We should give them a free pass; a free pass to the owners of Tesla, of Amazon. They can leave us their address and we will send them supplies.

It seems like the notion of the concentration of wealth has come to a climax. The entanglement of power and capital has reached such a degree of accumulation that the political and the financial management of the world can no longer be separated. There was a time when there were governments and revolutions. There were plenty of the latter in Latin America: Mexico in the 19th and 20th centuries was a real laboratory for them. This culture of revolutions, in which people take action, overthrow governments, and create other forms of governance, no longer makes sense today. Not in Latin America, nor in Africa, nor on any other continent. This is because governments no longer exist. We are now governed by big corporations. Who is going to overthrow the corporations? It would be like fighting ghosts. Power is now an abstraction concentrated in brands merged into corporations and represented by a few humanoids. I have no doubt that these humanoids, spellbound by the power of money, will also reach a saturation point. We are experiencing a gradual change in the conditions for life on this planet and we will all be brought down to the same level. Both trillionaires and you and I will all face the same fate.

These people who hold all the wealth have the nerve to live in areas where they can be shielded from illnesses, each with their own personal ventilator. What they are unaware of is that the power source for their secret bunkers can also be switched off. No matter what apparatus they are setting up, they could end up like that astronaut in 2001: A Space Odyssey, who is disconnected from his capsule while taking a spacewalk. So who knows? Maybe this cream of the crop – these guys who have long been used to watching the world die from the towers of their castles – will have to experience as big a risk as anyone else. Some critics may disagree and say that these guys have always had an extraordinary ability to transform crises into an opportunity to increase wealth concentration, but this also has a limit. Even the laws of physics show that nothing can be indefinitely concentrated, which is why some nuclear reactors leak – or explode.

We are addicted to modernity. Most inventions are an attempt by us humans to project ourselves into matter beyond our bodies. This gives us a sense of power, of permanence, the illusion that we will continue to exist. Modernity has these artifices. The idea of photography, for example, which is not so recent: projecting an image beyond that moment in which you are alive is a fantastic thing. And then we get stuck in a kind of senseless looping. This is an incredible drug, much more dangerous than the ones that the system bans out there. We are so doped up by this wicked reality of consumption and entertainment that we become disconnected from the Earth’s living organism. With all the evidence – the melting glaciers, the oceans full of garbage, the increasing lists of endangered species – could ripping up the Earth be the only way to show the denialists that it is a living organism? Tearing it into small pieces and showing them: “Look, is it alive?” It is absurdly stupid.

James Lovelock, who developed the Gaia hypothesis, was kicked out of a NASA research program, marginalized by the folks who overestimated Darwin’s theory. For them, the notion that the Earth is a living organism was unscientific. Until the late 1990s, any research that approached this organism as an intelligent thing would be written off. Thomas Lovejoy, known as the father of biodiversity studies, as well as a number of researchers working on the Gaia theory, had dispersed. The status of some of these scientists was devalued to the point where there was no one to fund their research anymore. Of course, some of their followers are still active: here in Brazil, for example, we have Antonio Nobre, who has been carrying on with these speculations about the different languages that the Earth’s organism uses to communicate with us. However, in the last five or six years, with the escalation of the climate crisis and the planet boiling up, these deniers have begun to refrain from their skeptical perspective, expressing their wish to understand the Gaia theory. I leave this to the unbelievers. Those who already heard the voice of the mountains, the rivers, and the forests do not need a theory about this: every theory is an effort to explain to the hardheads the reality that they cannot see.

Whether in a forest or in a flat, we need to awaken our inner power and stop looking for culprits around us, be they corporations or the government. Because all those things come to an end, and we cannot have an expiration date like theirs. We should not wait for the government, supermarkets, or any of those factories that package everything to send us supplies. Most people not only eat things that seem to be poisoned, like strawberries and tomatoes, but they do not even know what a lot of things that they consume are. If you read the nutritional information of a given product, it is full of words whose meaning you do not understand. Now, how are you going to believe that? They may have processed all sorts of rubbish and are giving it to you to eat. That is why it would be much better if we took care of our little seeds, saw them sprout, looked after them, and then harvested them. Only then will we know where what we eat comes from.

Excerpt from “You Can’t Eat Money” in Life is Not Useful, 1-8, Polity Press, 2023, Translated by Jamille Pinheiro Dias and Alex Brostoff.

Dodd, Vincent. Review of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. Anthropological Forum, no. 33, vol. 2, 2023, pp. 146–148, https://doi.org/10.1080/00664677.2023.2244182.

Ibelli-Bianco, Carolina. Review of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. International Journal of Environmental Studies, 2023, pp. 1499–1500, https://doi.org/10.1080/00207233.2023.2222606.

Zhao, Kedi. Review of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. Journal of Postcolonial Writing, no. 60, vol. 3, 2023, pp. 424–425. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2023.2285102.

Williams, Jeremy. Review of Life Is Not Useful, by Ailton Krenak. The Earthbound Report. March 13, 2023. https://earthbound.report/2023/03/13/book-review-life-is-not-useful-by-ailton-krenak/.

The Devouring of the World and the Climate Crisis
Institute for Religion, Culture, and Public Life, Columbia University
September 2021