Ailton Krenak writes against the fantasy that the Earth exists as a resource, against the idea that humanity is separate from the living world, and against the miserable little logic that everything must be productive, monetisable, improving, measurable, useful.

Life Is Not Useful gathers short essays and reflections that move through ecology, Indigenous knowledge, capitalism, climate catastrophe, colonial violence, technology, dreams, debt, rivers, forests, food, money and the stupidity of treating the planet as raw material for human projects.

Krenak’s style is clear, direct and quietly devastating. He does not write “environmentalism” as a lifestyle correction, but as a confrontation with the whole structure of modern thought: the myth of progress, the arrogance of extraction, the violence of development, the deadening demand that life justify itself through use. 

Polity Press paperback, English edition published 2023. First published in Portuguese as A vida não é útil in Brazil, 2020. Translated by Alex Brostoff. Good second-hand condition.