The idea of a single, universal 'humanity' is not a neutral fact but a club that admitted some peoples as fully human while demoting Indigenous and other populations to sub-humanity or nature, to be managed or exploited. This abstraction floats above everyone as a norm while most of those it claims to include were never actually invited in.
Treating specific rivers, mountains and forests as named grandfathers, ancestors or persons with whom one is in relationship, rather than as resources or scenery, changes what counts as harm: polluting a river is killing a relative, not degrading an asset. This relational stance is presented not as metaphor but as a lived cosmology among particular peoples.
The 'end of the world' is reframed as something recurring and survivable: many Indigenous peoples have already lived through the collapse of their world under colonization and persisted. Postponing the end means multiplying stories, songs and diverse ways of inhabiting the earth, because a monoculture of one 'correct' human life is itself what accelerates collapse.
In 2015 the collapse of the Fundão tailings dam (Samarco/Vale/BHP) sent mining waste down the Rio Doce, which the Krenak call Watu and regard as a grandfather; the river the people bathed in, fished and depended on was effectively killed. Krenak uses this concrete event as evidence that an ecology treated as mere resource becomes a dead body rather than a living relative.
Mainstream 'sustainable development' and 'conscious consumption' are criticized as ways to keep the extractive machine running while soothing consciences, flattening diverse peoples into a single managed humanity aimed at production and consumption. The alternative is not better management of nature but refusing the separation of humanity from nature in the first place.