Ideas to Postpone the End of the World

"Again, this is another really short book, but it’s very eye-opening. Ailton Krenak is from an indigenous community in the Brazilian Amazon, returned there, and became a kind of activist and leader. He talks about the indigenous worldview of his people, and how those concepts might help us think about the role of humans in relation to our habitat and in relation to each other. So it’s really about climate change and how we understand it. One version of adaptation might be that we need rapid political and technological change. We need renewable energy. All of these things. My take is that it requires a shift in behaviour, a shift in frames of reference, in how we think. And I think this book is a terrific blueprint for some of the shifts that need to be made. It’s quite surprising and arresting to lots of people who are steeped in the very rational Western tradition. I just love it because of the easy, kind way that he offers all this to people for whom it might be unfamiliar. It’s about taking inspiration, not assuming. All religions are worldviews and, to some extent, a kind of bricolage of different things. We need to be actively assembling a collage of ways of thinking. An important point: this is not an alternative to the hard work of organising, of legislative change, of social justice. This is not a theory of change that rests on yoga retreats and spiritual experiences—that’s not going to cut it. That won’t reduce emissions and ensure food security for billions of people. But! All of these things need to happen at the same time. We have to have a shift in consciousness in order to have a shift in politics, and social and economic relations. There’s a quote in my book, The Treeline : “Systems change when there’s a culture that demands it.” The more we have a culture that questions the assumptions of rational political systems, and economic unlimited growth, the more resilient we will be, the more able to imagine and build alternatives. As soon as you read a book like this, you won’t be able to look at a forest again without thinking of all the other non-human beings that are there. Without thinking about your right to even pick a leaf, let alone cut a tree down. That’s an important corrective, I think. It’s something that we’ve lost. If you can read Beowulf , or other old British myths and cosmologies, and find some of that message in there, then brilliant. But in the absence of that… that’s where indigenous stories come in. It’s to help us stop and reflect, and imagine differently. The Treeline is a journey around the Arctic Circle, which is also—at the moment—just about the growing limit of trees in the north. It’s a journey of discovery of what’s happening to that treeline as the planet warms, and what that might mean for humanity as a whole. We meet individual species in six chapters around the top of the world, from Scotland, Scandinavia, Siberia, Alaska, Canada, and Greenland. We also meet scientists and people living in those regions. It’s a blend of travelogue and science. And I hope it’s both a journey of wonder, as the reader experiences these incredible places and incredible people, but also an invitation to reflect on what’s happening and weave in some of the anthropology and sociology about why we are where we are. It ends with an epilogue that echoes many of the themes we’ve been talking about, about how we look at the world, what we prioritise, and how we begin to unpick the damage."