$20.00
Purchases will be bundled with the “Standing in the Fire” 2025 report free of charge
Co-author Vanessa Machado de Oliveira writes:
We are living in a time when economic, social, and ecological systems are unraveling. Some call this the metacrisis, others the polycrisis or permacrisis. At its heart, this moment reflects the breaching of planetary boundaries—a direct consequence of the illusion that infinite growth is possible on a finite planet. As these systems break down, they reveal the fragility and hidden violence of modernity’s promises of endless progress and prosperity. This unraveling fuels waves of instability—social, economic, political, ecological, and psychological—that force us to fundamentally rethink how we live and how we relate to each other and to the planet we are part of.
In my 30-year professional journey as an educator and academic working in this area, and through years of ceremonial training alongside Indigenous relatives in Aotearoa, Canada, Peru and Brazil, one fact has become undeniable: the greatest threat to our existence as a species is the arrogance of human exceptionalism. This paradigm, which separates humans from the rest of nature, fosters a reductionist rationality that extracts, consumes, and discards without regard for the consequences. It is a way of thinking, sensing, relating and being that is both profoundly limited and dangerously lethal for our survival.
This little book is not a blueprint or a set of answers. It is a provocation to challenge human exceptionalism and rethink intelligence—not as something to dominate or program for human gain, but as a relational capacity that can guide us through the decline of modernity with compassion, humility, and discernment. It is also an invitation to open the AI conversation table to voices and ways of knowing that modernity’s reductionist paradigms have long excluded or overlooked.
Softcover, English, 194 pages
15 x 21 cm
ISBN 978-1-0690497-1-1
Standing in the Fire report
Softcover, English, 105 pages
15 x 21 cm
ISBN 978-1-0690497-8-0
