As we see world after world vanish before our eyes, with mass extinction and stronger-than-ever extractive colonialism taking lives, changing environments, and destroying modes of being, we must learn not only how to mourn and tell the stories of the dead but also how to care for the beings and landscapes left behind, with their worlds now incomplete. This pathway aims to show how this situation, instead of paralyzing us, may call us to action: to care for worlds yet to come and that could have the power to “postpone the end of the world”—an expression used by Indigenous Krenak leader and thinker Aílton Krenak, who invites us to look for and live the ideas that have the power to “hold up the sky.”7.2.1

Holding up the sky—averting the end of the world or, in this case, keeping Earth hospitable—is no mean feat, as Yanomami shaman and Indigenous leader Davi Kopenawa Yanomami teaches us in his masterpiece The Falling Sky.7.2.2 But one way for those of us who are not shamans to go about this task is to examine, redirect, and transform our inherited, modern ways of inhabiting Earth. The question of habitability takes center stage here. “Inhabiting” is a possible name—maybe even a good one—for a set of modes of acting, thinking, feeling, and being through which a world is given shape out of the flesh of the Earth. Inhabiting, of course, varies just as actions, thoughts, or feelings vary. In that sense, there are as many modes of inhabiting as there are collective modes of thinking, acting, and feeling. These are, in philosopher Isabelle Stengers’ crucial term, “ecologies of practices.” Since 2020, the Research Group in the Ecology of Practices and I have been bringing together researchers of all sorts to ask questions about ways of inhabiting Earth in the Cosmic Conversations project.7.2.3 By stimulating an open-ended dialogue between researchers across disciplinary boundaries, we hope to think, feel, and act together through our present troubles. This course creates an occasion for a new set of conversations in which the issue of habitability is once again at the forefront.

Habitability—a quality that becomes more precious and invaluable as the planet every day becomes less and less hospitable for humans and nonhumans acclimated to the Holocene—is not a given, but a co-creation. It is the result of different ecologies of practices coming together, shaping Earth, crafting a common world. Thus, it is inhabiting that creates habitability for some, and destroys it for others. The interweaving of different modes of inhabiting creates the common ground upon which particular worldings will further differentiate. That is why the question of learning how to land on this Earth, now that it should seem obvious to most that there is no Planet B, is so important to the philosopher Bruno Latour.7.2.4 Through the metaphor of a crash landing, Latour indicates that modern peoples have become detached from earthly concerns, seeing themselves as floating as high as their ideas, and now must come to terms with living bound to Earth.

However, let us not be overgenerous and endorse the still common discourse that environmental consciousness—the recognition of the reciprocal aspects of inhabiting—is a recent achievement. For centuries, people have, over and over again, recognized and denounced as destructive the modes of inhabiting that have led to the conditions of the Anthropocene. And yet, colonial modes of inhabiting remain strong, claiming humans and nonhumans alike as victims of the goals of growth and progress, as Chantel Comardelle, Theresa Dardar, Traditional Chief Albert Naquin, Chief Shirell Parfait-Dardar, and Elder Rosina Philippe, all tribal leaders from Louisiana’s Gulf Coast, show in their conversation with environmental studies professor Nathan Jessee.7.2.5

One of the particularities of the Anthropocene that distinguishes it from previous epochs is that a specific set of modes of inhabiting has become dominant and sought to replace all others. This monoculture of modes of inhabiting was erected upon a willful ignorance regarding the necessities that other inhabitings entail, showing utter contempt for what is not available for mass extraction or, worse, that resists it. “Nature,” rather than being what these modes of inhabiting turned their backs to, is what enabled such extraction. 

“Nature” is not simply a collective name for all animals, plants, rivers, mountains, clouds, and stars, or whatever is “outside” us humans. “Nature” is an idea that permeates all modern practices and shapes specific modes of inhabiting this Earth. It is a specific worlding, invented just a few hundred years ago, by certain peoples, in certain places. It is no surprise, then, that this monoculture of modes of inhabiting is tightly knit with modern monoculture practices in agriculture, which turn richly populated environments into spaces occupied by a handful of organisms. Since these landscapes aim to ignore local conditions and history, besides what can be exploited for rapid crop growth and large yields, they are movable and repeatable, and so we may find, as artist Ryan Griffis shows in his film project The Great Green Desert,7.2.6 very similar landscapes across the Americas, from the US Midwest to Central-West Brazil. This mode of inhabiting also has little concern for whatever is “outside” its production cycle, leaving wastelands in the wake of its extractive activities. Sociologist Sebastián Ureta’s mapping of mining tailings in Chile7.2.7 shows the long-lasting environmental and social scarring caused by mass extraction and the refusal to deal with its by-products, which he connects to the specificity of the experience of the Anthropocene in the global south. 

While denouncing these destructive ways of inhabiting Earth remains an urgent task, it is also important to look for ways of healing the environments and zones of experience suffering devastation. Healing, to me, lies in caring for webs of interdependency and paying attention to the conditions of reproduction of certain ecologies of practices—their beings,  bodies, technologies, spaces, temporalities, and modes of inhabiting—while turning away from eco-pathological ecologies of practices, that is, those that would destroy their very conditions of persistence or the possibility of flourishing for others. Care, for me, means paying attention to how others pay attention, and thus to what they require, what gives shape to their practices. This requires, first and foremost, taking others, and their worlds, seriously. 

Philosophers Didier Debaise and Isabelle Stengers warn us to avoid the temptation of “ironical or voyeuristic distance, tolerant interpretation in terms of subjective cultural beliefs, or else mimetic leap[ing] that always risks exoticizing what one aims to share.”7.2.8 A way to heal the devastation wrought by the monoculture of modes of inhabiting is consenting to a “pluralist universe” while refusing to reduce the worlds of others to the categories of one’s own. It is to translate across worlds what gives shape to different practices, in an act of trust. 

The sociologist Bronislaw Szerszynski speculated about this possibility in the first Anthropocene Campus when he tried to convey a little bit of what he had learned, and what others may learn, from Yanomami cosmology.7.2.9 His hope is that the contact with ways of thinking rejected by modern knowledge practices may reactivate senses and notions deemed less important or that were forgotten in the West. We—inheritors of Modernity—have barely just begun the task of creating such a connection, let alone finding mutual understanding, between different modes of production of knowledge and truths, and there can be no other first step than to continuously learn from those who have been resisting the many world-ending events brought upon by colonization. 

In a very rich conversation between activists Davi Kopenawa Yanomami and Dário Kopenawa Yanomami and playwright and director Christiane Jatahy,7.2.10 the Yanomami shaman underscored the power of ideas in shaping environments. He explained that he wrote The Falling Sky with the anthropologist Bruce Albert so that “the whites” (the non-Indigenous) may understand the importance of the forest. Urihi, in the Yanomami language, means “forest” but also “Earth-forest” or “world-forest,” and it is a word intimately connected to a mode of inhabiting Earth entirely different than that practiced by the West. Davi Kopenawa’s work and activism propagate and invite us to look for the Urihi noamatima thë ã—the words to protect the forest. Seeking to protect the forest, the Hutukara Yanomami Association has since 2004 worked to keep the Yanomami Indigenous Territory safe from trespassers such as clandestine miners, loggers, and gunmen working for large landowners while also expanding and strengthening Yanomami culture and occupation of their ancestral territory.

Talking about the ways modern peoples may, or may not, be open to understanding Indigenous worldings, Aílton Krenak says: “You say that the entities from the waters, from the rivers and forests, are all a myth, a fantasy. If all of it is a fantasy, if all of it is mythology, then, definitely, you do not want other worlds to exist.”7.2.11 He lived through a world-ending event when, in 2015, his relative Watu, the river known as the rio Doce, was covered by mud filled with toxic mining tailings following a failure of the Fundão dam. This was, of course, an ecological disaster of enormous proportions, but it was more harshly felt by the Krenak people, who saw the living river, their ancestor, come so close to death. This devastated their ways of inhabiting their ancestral land. However, this led Aílton Krenak to continue, and even intensify, his educational and political work among the non-Indigenous, seeking to reach common ground about what a world of many worlds looks like. Despite his apparent death, Watu comes to the Krenak people in dreams to tell them he is regenerating, that he may still come back. The activist work against the continuous damming of the rio Doce is an alliance of human and more-than-human beings seeking to construct habitability for plural worlds.

Isael Maxakali and Sueli Maxakali—both Indigenous activists, teachers, filmmakers, and artists—also seek to create another mode of inhabiting Earth through the project of a Village-School-Forest.7.2.12 This is “a space for exchanging knowledge, reforestation, recovery of water springs, workshops for art and cinema and strengthening of the musical, ritual and cosmological complex known as yãmĩyxop,” as Roberto Romero and Rosângela de Tugny explain on the project’s website. According to Isael and Sueli, they call it Village-School-Forest “because the entire village is a school for us. The river is a school, the forest is a school, the animals too. Every place in the village is a school.” In his drawings,7.2.13 Isael seeks to recreate the presence of animals now gone, or almost gone, from the territory where the Maxakali live, so that these animals may persist, connecting past, present, and future in modes of inhabiting Earth that insist on resisting the destruction of the forest and keeping alive the memory of its inhabitings.

Caring and healing demand a lot of work. But learning to inhabit this Earth in a caring way so that the conditions of its habitability permit the continuous proliferation of worlds, human and nonhuman, is what we—inheritors of the moderns—must do, if we are to have a future freed from the monoculture of modes of inhabiting that brought us to where we are. This is why caring for coming worlds is not only a matter of availability of information or of raising awareness, although these are important goals to work toward; it is also a matter of crafting new modes of inhabiting, in a cosmic conversation that brings together all sorts of beings, their practices, and their worlds.