The Story Is In Our Bones - How worldviews & climate justice can remake a world in crisis
A dominant, human-centered worldview has brought us to the brink of social, ecological, and climate collapse. Braiding poetic storytelling, deep cultural and climate justice analyses, and knowledge of Earth-centered cultures, The Story is in Our Bones opens a portal to restoration and justice beyond the end of a world.
Description
It’s time to rewild ourselves and our dominant worldviews to build Earth-centered communities for all
These pages summon from our bones our commitment to defend this living Earth.
—Joanna Macy, author, Coming Back to Life and Active Hope
The dominant cultural worldview is based upon extraction and exploitation practices that have brought us to the precipice of social, environmental, and climate collapse. Braiding poetic storytelling, climate justice analyses, and collective knowledge of Earth-centered cultures, The Story is in Our Bones opens a portal to restoration and justice beyond the end of a world in crisis.
Author, activist, and changemaker Osprey Orielle Lake weaves together ecological, mythical, political, and cultural understandings and shares her experiences working with global leaders, climate justice activists, Indigenous Peoples, and systems-thinkers. She seeks to summon a new way of being and thinking in the Anthropocene, which includes transforming the interlocking crises of colonialism, racism, patriarchy, capitalism, and ecocide, to build thriving Earth communities for all.
For anyone grieving our collective loss and wanting to take action, The Story is in Our Bones is a vital guide to remaking our world. This hopeful, engaging, and creatively lyrical work reminds readers that another world is possible, and provides a desperately needed antidote to the pervasive despair of our time.
Excerpt
“To address any great dilemma, we must examine how we perceive it and approach it. After decades of working in social and environmental movements, I continually circle back to a core entry point of transformation: the portal of worldviews.”
“Without examining worldviews, we will not conjure and enact the level of imagination, relationships, and ethics now needed.
Worldviews express the fundamental nature of a particular culture—how it operates and constructs perceptions and relationships.
They provide an all-em-bracing assemblage of the world around us, including the greater cosmos, and how the world came into being.
Worldviews influence who we are, how we behave, our dreams, imaginings, and our relationship to the very web of life.
A worldview is a composition of principles, narratives, codes of conduct, and foundational assumptions about reality, which inform our scientific discourse, cultural norms, political and social ideologies, and all aspects of our lived experiences.”
“How did the dominant culture arrive at this paradoxical moment, when we have healthy and equitable path- ways to address our greatest problems, but the central worldview is fixated on cataclysmic exploits?”
“Some of the most damaging and pervasive worldviews are human dominion over nature, separation from a living Earth, and structural patri- archy and white supremacy.”
“The emergent societal scaffolding and cultural story we are engaged in seeks to disentangle itself from a violent colonial and patriarchal stronghold, and in that ever-burgeoning effort, there can be no throwaway people, lands, or species.
Instead, we are weaving life-enhancing worldviews and new ways of being and thinking into our projects, narratives, and programs.
The core focus is to transition from an extractivist paradigm of exploitation, hyper-individualism, and supremacy to a relational Earth-conscious understanding of respect, reci- procity, and restoration.”
“The compounded tsunami of societal dysfunction and ecological devastation did not appear suddenly on the global stage—these behaviors and consequences are rooted in a long-standing disrespect for neighbor and nature, fueled by the dominant culture.”
“The process of shifting our worldviews in mainstream society is likely to be disorienting and challenging as we encounter and invite different concepts and realties. Yet, if we slow down on the trail, we might allow ourselves to see how some of our life experiences are already embroidered with other ways of knowing and seeing—they have only been veiled or devalued by cultural constructs.”
“This shift in worldview to an animate cosmology, in which we are inextricably and wondrously entangled, is an essential transformation and responsibility as we strive to become more human in a frenzied, colonized, modern world—a world that tries relentlessly to separate us from each other, Mother Earth, and the greater cosmos.”
“Without an honest, decolonized historical narrative dwelling in broader multivalent worldviews, we will be unable to build a life-enhancing and equitable future for all beings”
“The collective project is to contextualize ourselves in the bigger narrative that makes up our modern life. This contextualizing is a way of sense-making and orienting to sanity, care, belonging, and effective action in the midst of dangerous mayhem.”
Contents
