Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
In The Story Is in Our Bones, author, activist and changemaker Osprey Orielle Lake draws on decades of experience to provide a remarkable exploration of the way forward, intriguingly captured in the subtitle How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis.
As someone who has long been both pro-environment and anti-war, I hope that my words can play a part in providing a bridge between the two movements.
Feeding ourselves is a lot of things – it’s a network, it’s an event, it’s movement building – and it’s growing. First with CSAs, then agroecologists, then local food proponents, then those with wider food justice concerns, then environmentalists and ruralists, and now also conventional farmers from the region – in all their way, with their own diversities.
This revolution requires no heroic sacrifices at the barricades. It requires patient plodding at the task of spreading the new ideas and values.
While we may change the kinds of cars we drive, we won’t change our lifestyles to fit a climate-challenged future. Millions upon millions of new zero-emission vehicles will be required and to create them, we’ll need staggering amounts of resources that are still lodged below the earth’s crust.
It has been concluded that the best chance for preserving the Amazon, and its ability to buffer against climate change, lies in placing formally protected areas and lands in the charge of indigenous peoples.
The ‘tipping point’ at which humanity became a majority-urban species finally occurred in 2008; this trend has continued (55% by 2018), and may be 70% by the middle of the 21st century.
My hope is that what I have shared here will convince others of the powerful opportunity we all have to rise up against prevailing messages intent on keeping us powerless, and to experience in the company of others our ability to effect change. May we all have strong hearts and loving companions for such a journey.
Every time I visit a farm, I have hope. Despite everything that’s going on, the fact that people are still producing so much food and thriving gives me hope.
Energy is meant to supply vitality, not threaten destruction. It is the flow of life through an ecosystem.
Maybe fighting to save the high street through the power of social enterprise and community business is the wrong fight. Maybe we should be fighting instead for ownership of these new places in the new high street?
If someone’s gut reaction is to dismiss talk of modernity’s demise as dismal doomerism, I wonder what bolsters their confidence in the opposite conclusion.
