Brazilian Indigenous leader, writer and environmental thinker Ailton Krenak has spent decades challenging dominant political and economic assumptions in Brazil, arguing that modern consumer-driven society has severed humanity’s relationship with nature while deepening social inequality and ecological destruction.

Nearly four decades after a landmark appearance before Brazil’s constitutional assembly helped secure Indigenous rights protections in the country’s democratic constitution, Krenak has emerged as one of the country’s most influential public intellectuals, combining environmental criticism, Indigenous cosmology and political activism in lectures and bestselling books translated into more than 13 languages.

Krenak, 72, first gained national prominence in 1987 during the drafting of Brazil’s post-dictatorship constitution. Addressing lawmakers in Brasília while wearing a suit and tie, he slowly covered his face with black jenipapo dye, traditionally used in Indigenous body painting, as he condemned centuries of violence against Indigenous communities.“Indigenous blood has been spilt over every hectare of Brazil’s 8m square kilometres,” he told legislators at the time.

The gesture became one of the defining images of Brazil’s democratic transition and contributed to the inclusion of constitutional protections recognising Indigenous peoples’ rights to their traditional lands, social organisation and cultural identity under the 1988 constitution.Reflecting on the speech nearly 40 years later, Krenak described congress as a place where political power was concentrated through language and public speech.

“There, the young Ailton understood the meaning of parliament,” he said. “The place to speak, the power of the word.”In 2024, Krenak entered another historically exclusive institution when he became the first Indigenous Brazilian elected to the Brazilian Academy of Letters, an organisation founded in the 19th century and traditionally dominated by white intellectual elites.

At his inauguration ceremony, Krenak used the occasion to highlight Brazil’s Indigenous diversity, invoking dozens of Indigenous peoples while wearing the academy’s formal embroidered uniform alongside Indigenous adornments.“I am only one, but I can invoke 305 peoples,” he said.Krenak’s growing international influence has been driven largely by a series of books focused on environmental degradation, capitalism and the relationship between humanity and the natural world.

His 2020 book Ideas to Postpone the End of the World became a major commercial and intellectual success in Brazil and abroad, later followed by Life Is Not Useful and Ancestral Future.Across his writing and public lectures, Krenak argues that modern societies have normalised environmental destruction through economic systems centered on consumption and extraction.

“We are treading heavily on the Earth,” he said during a recent lecture in Rio de Janeiro. “Modernity is very active in making us consumers but leaves little time and space to coexist.”Krenak frequently frames environmental collapse not only as a scientific or political issue but also as a cultural and spiritual crisis. He criticises what he describes as a model of development that treats nature exclusively as a resource for economic growth.

“Development is not an innocent word,” he said. “It fires a shot at someone.”Despite the severity of his message, Krenak often delivers lectures with humour and conversational ease. During one recent appearance, he abruptly interrupted his own discussion of social exclusion and environmental decline by joking that the audience had “fallen into a trap” after expecting a more uplifting talk about dreams and creativity.

Friends and observers frequently describe his public speaking style as calm and accessible despite the radical nature of many of his arguments.Born in 1953 in Minas Gerais state, Krenak belongs to the Krenak people, whose ancestral territory lies along the Doce River in southeastern Brazil.

He recalls spending his childhood surrounded by forests, rivers and open land before military-era land seizures displaced his community.During Brazil’s military dictatorship, authorities fragmented Krenak territory and redistributed land titles to farmers, forcing Indigenous families to flee repeatedly.“It’s a bodily experience of being in a world with no risks,” Krenak said of his early childhood.

“Then suddenly you are warned by adults that you must run away.”His family eventually fled through several regions of Brazil, at times living along highways while searching for safety.“I remember the feeling of being on the run, of not knowing if we’d find a safe place to sleep,” he said.

Krenak has often linked those experiences of displacement to broader historical patterns affecting Indigenous communities and diasporic populations. He argues that Brazilian society lacks a shared historical memory because different groups experienced the country’s development through profoundly unequal realities.

“We are not equal,” he said. “We don’t have a shared memory of history in Brazil.”After relocating to São Paulo and Paraná, Krenak became involved in organising Indigenous political movements and media initiatives. He helped establish an Indigenous newspaper at São Paulo’s Pontifical Catholic University, later transforming it into audio bulletins distributed to Indigenous villages on cassette tapes and eventually into a radio programme.

In 1980, he co-founded the Union of Indigenous Nations, which became a major voice in Brazil’s Indigenous rights movement during the democratic transition.Krenak’s environmental advocacy was further shaped by the 2015 Mariana mining disaster, one of Brazil’s worst environmental catastrophes.

The collapse of a tailings dam owned by mining companies Vale and BHP Billiton destroyed villages and released toxic waste across hundreds of miles of the Doce River basin.For the Krenak people, the river is regarded as a sacred ancestor known as Watu.Ten years after the disaster, Krenak said the river remains deeply damaged.“To declare it dead would be giving up,” he said, describing the river instead as being “in a coma”.

Krenak continues to argue that Indigenous knowledge systems offer alternatives to economic models based solely on extraction and consumption.

He says modern societies must reconsider assumptions about progress, ownership and humanity’s place within nature.“If I can imagine a utopia,” he said, “it is for humans to recover the experience of a simple life.”