The Story Is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis

By Osprey Orielle Lake. New Society Publishers, 2024. 400 pages. $29.99/paperback or eBook.

In The Story Is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis, Osprey Orielle Lake, founder and executive director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), shares lessons that have emerged from her listening to and learning about Indigenous communities around the world. She believes the moment we’re living in calls for “deep systemic change entailing a metamorphic shift in worldview: literally, how we understand the world and our relationship and responsibility to the web of life and each other.” She aims for her book to become a part of a “collective conversation” that moves us toward “a relational Earth-conscious understanding of respect, reciprocity, and restoration.” Throughout the book, Lake models putting Indigenous voices at the center while recognizing the impact of her own white privilege. The Story Is in Our Bones invites readers to consider their past, present, and potential future and expand their moral imagination by considering what elements of global Indigenous wisdom would help create the world we seek.

Much of the book is an exploration of what communities worldwide did to care for the earth and each other before colonialism, capitalism, and patriarchy defined the times. Lake encourages readers to reconnect with their Indigenous past, wherever their ancestors may be from. She also advocates for a re-embracing of ancient origin stories, which were originally “land-based stories” but “have been long desecrated or co-opted and perverted by thousands of years of colonization and patriarchy.” She notes that Indigenous cosmologies—many of which have evolved to reflect modern thinking—once portrayed male and female deities equally and respected diverse genders rather than a narrow gender binary. She also mourns the loss of myriad Indigenous languages that better reflected an Earth-conscious mindset, as “[m]ost Indigenous languages recognize nonhuman beings with agency as ‘persons’ and express these relationships as sentient kin.”

The book paints a dire picture of where today’s dominant worldviews have gotten us. Lake grieves that “[s]ome of the most damaging and pervasive worldviews are human dominion over nature, separation from a living Earth, and structural patriarchy and white supremacy” and that “[t]he current dominant society is based upon power over and exploitation of women, Indigenous Peoples, People of Color, and the land.” She points to ways that cisgender white men are consistently entrusted and empowered while women, nonbinary people, and people of color are often considered less worthy and experience consistent discrimination. To add to those dynamics, Lake illustrates how “[f]alse scarcity is integral to colonialism and capitalism” in the way that it maintains power and wealth for the few “at the expense of everyone else.” This us-vs-them mentality extends to the ways we engage with the earth. Rather than seeing the earth as our kin, humans have put ourselves at the center, “pav[ing] the way for exploitation and extractivism of the land since the sacredness of life has now been relegated to malevolence.” These habits of mind, working in unison, “have led to a huge deficit in political will and necessary action.”

The book points to a better world and offers a roadmap. Lake believes that the solutions needed right now will come from the margins, especially women and Indigenous communities. She also trusts the earth itself: “We have so much to learn from Mother Earth’s wisdom, design, and balance, if we take the time to listen, watch, respect, and learn.” She believes that, “we need our movements to hold an intersectional justice lens,” and she tells stories throughout the book of those movements that have put the earth, the sacred feminine, and Indigenous wisdom at the center, and she tells of the tangible impact they have made. In particular, she speaks to the movements around a Just Transition, Land Back, and Rights of Nature. The book is equally full of aspirations of what could be and the lessons of those who are currently bringing that world into being.

I was not surprised to find environmental activist Joanna Macy, who is beloved by many Friends, listed in the acknowledgments, as The Story Is in Our Bones reflects the kind of radical hope that we are used to hearing from her. As a Quaker, I appreciated queries that appear throughout the book, such as “[w]hat is the composition of our cultural soil?” and “how can the dominant society relearn our role as a keystone species and protect and enrich water, land, forest, animals, and the entirety of the web of life?” Lake notes that the “changes so necessary for our survival will not happen without impassioned advocacy from change-makers.” I believe Quakers are up for the task.

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Lauren Brownlee is a member of Bethesda (Md.) Meeting where she serves on the Ministry and Worship and Peace and Social Justice Committees. She also serves as deputy general secretary for Friends Committee on National Legislation.