An Indigenous Author Offers Ancestral Answers to Today’s Environmental Crises
By Manuela Andreoni
New York Times
August 14, 2024
Ailton Krenak was a child when his family was forced to leave their land in Brazil. Now, as a writer, he advocates for a path forward that looks to nature and inherited wisdom.
Krenak, an Indigenous author from Brazil, used the microphone malfunction to launch into one of the main messages of “Ancestral Future,” his new book: Technology often gives people the illusion they’re tackling the crises humanity has unleashed on the planet, he said. Societies should, instead, try to chart the path ahead by looking at what was here before: nature, and ways of living that had all of nature, and not just human beings, at their center.