Complete Review: Inquietações de um Brasil contemporâneo

There are books that present themselves as diagnoses, others as manuals, and some as exercises in critical imagination. Inquietações de um Brasil contemporâneo belongs to the last kind. Published by Autêntica, the book is not merely a gathering of essays: it is a mosaic of voices that, coming from different places, meet to think the country through three urgent and interwoven axes: the climatic, the digital-technological and the biological.

The premise is clear and provocative: imagining Brazil's future demands abandoning the comfort of ready-made futurology and facing the most uncomfortable question of all, which future is possible when the future no longer resembles anything we have known? The book brings five authors, all Fellows of the Instituto Arapyaú, who sign collectively. Among them, Samela Sateré Mawé stands out, an Indigenous activist who lends the project a rare layer of vision: one that is not limited to the technical field, as Samela holds a degree in biology from the Universidade do Estado do Amazonas, but which incorporates her ancestry, the memory of original peoples and the urgency of repositioning Brazil not as a peripheral country, but as guardian of knowledge vital to the planet.

‍

The first chapter addresses the environmental and climate agenda, highlighting Brazil's potential as a global leader while warning of the need for political courage to turn ecological advantage into effective leadership, facing internal contradictions. In the second, the focus falls on the modernisation of the State, seen as a technical and ethical challenge, as well as the need to rebuild governance capable of answering domestic demands of inequality and environmental degradation while acting in international climate geopolitics. The third chapter discusses agribusiness critically, arguing that there is room to integrate food production and environmental preservation, but that such convergence requires structural change and not merely local adjustment. The fourth presents Nature-Based Solutions, arguing for the ancestral knowledge of original peoples and the need to understand and incorporate it as a strategy for transition to a regenerative economy. The contribution of the Indigenous activist Samela Sateré Mawé is central at that point, stressing that sustainability cannot be treated as an economic appendix, but as a structuring axis of development.

‍

‍

‍

In the final chapter, the proposal goes beyond environmental restoration, arguing also for the renewal of values and imaginaries, replacing models of infinite extraction with logics of interdependence and continuity. Inquietações de um Brasil contemporâneo does not deliver closed answers, and perhaps that is precisely its function.

In bringing together perspectives that run from macroeconomics to Indigenous cosmovision, the book shows that thinking Brazil demands polyphony, negotiation and openness to discomfort. For design, of products, of policies, of narratives, the work helps us think new ways of designing futures, beginning with what we decide to preserve.

‍

INQUIETAÇÕES DE UM BRASIL CONTEMPORÂNEO

Authors: Francisco Gaetani, Izabella Teixeira, Marcello Brito, Roberto S. Waack, Samela Sateré Mawé

Editora Autêntica

176 pages 

R$74.90

‍