Modern society treats life as useful only insofar as it produces, converting rivers, mountains, and people into resources to be consumed. This logic of utility is what licenses the destruction of the Earth, because whatever cannot be made productive is treated as disposable.
The idea of a single unified 'humanity' is a fiction that erases the plurality of peoples and lets a narrow group speak for everyone while excluding those deemed sub-human. This abstraction flattens difference and underwrites the civilizing project that dispossesses Indigenous and other marginalized peoples.
Seen through Indigenous relation, rivers and mountains are not scenery or resources but grandfathers, kin, and living beings with whom one is in relationship. Adopting this lens makes extraction legible as violence against relatives rather than mere use of inert matter.
Krenak describes the Watu (the Rio Doce), the river central to Krenak life, being killed by mining waste from the 2015 Mariana dam disaster, turning a living grandfather into mud. The people who relate to the river as kin mourned it as the death of a being, not the loss of a resource.
Rather than pursuing salvation or utopian solutions, the task is to keep inventing stories and ways of living that delay the catastrophe already underway. Survival lies in multiplying diverse ways of being on Earth, not in a single technical fix or future paradise.