A 47-hour journey across Manggar, Tanjungpandan, Cengkareng, Doha, São Paulo, and Santiago. An opening story that moves from a small island to the bustle of modern airports and finally to the stillness of the Andes valleys.
The world today lives in a tension unprecedented in human history. Scientists such as Will Steffen and Johan Rockström remind us that we are approaching climate tipping points that could permanently alter Earth’s systems. Philosophers like Bruno Latour ask once more who truly determines the fate of the planet. Meanwhile, James Lovelock, through the Gaia Hypothesis, asserts that the planet is not an inert object but a living organism that is beginning to respond to human disturbances. Amid this uncertainty, futurists like Yuval Noah Harari, Nick Bostrom, and Stuart Russell wonder whether artificial intelligence will save us or destroy us. And behind all these debates, Indigenous peoples across the world hold answers that are rarely taken seriously, that to survive, humanity must restore its emotional relationship with the Earth.
In a world divided between techno-optimists and eco-philosophers, figures like Arne Naess with deep ecology and Val Plumwood with her critique of the human–nature dualism present the idea that humans are not the center of the universe. Vandana Shiva adds the dimension of ecological justice, insisting that the climate crisis is not only an environmental crisis but also a social one. Through her sharp criticism of surveillance capitalism, Shoshana Zuboff highlights how the digital world disconnects humans from their inner relationship with the land. And when Timothy Morton introduces the concept of the hyperobject, he emphasizes that climate change is too vast to be grasped by ordinary human perception. All of this reveals that the world needs a new way of seeing.
Of course, Indigenous peoples have possessed such a worldview for centuries. Anthropologists like Claude Lévi-Strauss, Marcel Mauss, and Bronislaw Malinowski have described how traditional communities cultivate balanced, reciprocal, rather than exploitative, ways of living. Eduardo Viveiros de Castro calls this perspectivism, that nature itself has a point of view. Pacific thinker Epeli Hauʻofa adds the poetic idea that an island is not an isolated dot, but a node in a vast cosmological network. These are the kinds of knowledge now regarded as essential by Earth system scientists, anthropologists, and policymakers.
In the shadow of these global crises, a small story from Belitong becomes a mirror of the world. When a nine-minute phone call changed Yeni Srihartati’s daily plans, that decision became a doorway into a much larger dialogue, a dialogue between Asia-Pacific and South America, between Belitong and Kütralkura, between the people of Belitong and the Maphuce-Pehuenche community. She did not depart with a large entourage like the European delegations but with the confidence built from the local values of her small island; values that carry moral weight equal to Aldo Leopold’s Land Ethic.
The 47-hour journey across Manggar, Tanjungpandan, Cengkareng, Doha, São Paulo, Santiago, and finally Temuco became a kind of pilgrimage. From a small island to the bustle of modern airports and then to the silence of the Andes valleys, the journey reflects what Rebecca Solnit once wrote: that travel is a threshold space where humans learn about their own fragility and strength. It cuts through boundaries of time and language, echoing Parag Khanna’s claim that the modern world is no longer a map of nations but a map of connectivity.
Upon arriving in Temuco, the UNESCO Global Geoparks Conference unveiled the broad global stage: 229 geoparks from 50 countries gathering to discuss climate change, geological risk, gastronomy, education, and Indigenous peoples. Within this intellectual atmosphere, Iain Stewart’s theories of geological communication and Naomi Oreskes’s perspectives on climate politics resonated throughout every panel. Yeni stood as the sole delegate from Belitong, addressing the GGN Executive Board and expressing hope that her small island might host the 2027 conference. Although the final result favored Oeste UGGp in Portugal, backed by the strength of paleontological data and political support, Belitong did not lose in moral terms. Amartya Sen once said that development must be measured through the ability of a community to participate, and Belitong had taken its part.
Yet the summit of this journey was not in the conference hall but in the mountains of Lonquimay. During the scientific excursion titled “Witnesses to the Memory of the Earth,” Yeni touched natural landscapes shaped by millions of years of geological history. The Cura Mallín rocks, glacial valleys, and snow-covered Andean peaks reminded her that Earth has long been writing its own story, as geologist Wallace Broecker and volcanologist duo Katia and Maurice Krafft have described, the Earth is a living archive.
When the group entered the Araucaria forest, the scientific narrative transformed into a spiritual one. The Maphuce-Pehuenche community welcomed them with Piñón, the sacred seeds of the Araucaria, the “Tree of Life,” which has shaped their cosmology and gastronomy for thousands of years. As Mircea Eliade might have written in his studies of myth, the fire circle where Pehuenche elders spoke was a sacred space, where the human world and the ancestral world meet. There, Yeni learned that knowledge is not merely text or data; it is a rhythm of life.
The encounter with the Conchard family became one of the most dramatic moments. When they shared an ancestral prophecy about the arrival of a woman from a people who call father and mother as “Bapak” and “Ibu,” there was an inner tremor that even Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s theory could not explain. Yet it resonated perfectly with what Anna Tsing calls “the art of living in a ruined world,” a small space where two cultures meet and heal one another.
As she stepped through snow toward the ancient Araucaria trees, scientific theories about geological ages and evolution became only one layer of the experience. Another layer was the emotional beauty understood only by those who have stood between nature and the soul. Here, Donna Haraway’s idea of “staying with the trouble” making peace with the world’s complexity, felt wholly tangible.
In the “Indigenous People” workshop, when Yeni spoke of the Sawang people, the Ameng Sewang, and other sea peoples who are losing their living spaces due to modernization, the room fell silent. Researchers, scientists, and scholars from many countries realized that their theories carry real consequences for real communities. And as Linda Tuhiwai Smith teaches in Decolonizing Methodologies, conversations about Indigenous peoples must center their own voices. In that moment, Belitong and Kütralkura spoke the same language, the language of struggle.
This journey teaches that science alone is not enough, technology alone is not enough, policy alone is not enough. The world needs an emotional closeness to the Earth. It needs what Octavio Paz described as “the human longing to return to the root of existence.” It needs love, not merely data. Kütralkura and Belitong, two small regions on two different continents, are connected not by coincidence but because both are home to Indigenous communities who believe that the Earth is a home, not an economic machine. And as Jared Diamond writes in Collapse, civilizations survive only when they listen to their landscapes.
When the conference ended, Yeni returned not only with a report but with transcontinental friendships, invaluable knowledge, and the belief that her small island has a place at the table of global conversations. She came home with a new understanding that the future can only be built when technology and tradition, science and spirituality, modernity and Indigenous wisdom walk together. And in the end, this journey is a reminder that in a world filled with algorithms, weapons, and climate change, humanity still needs the simplest thing of all: relationship. Relationships between humans and humans. Humans and their land. Belitong and Kütralkura.
Corresponding Author: Arry Aditsya Yoga | Researcher in International Law, Ecopolitology, and Anthropology.