Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We are smart, linguistic, ultrasocial, tool-making primates who have recently stumbled upon an energy bonanza. We’ve accomplished wonders. But we have also become our own worst enemy. Collective survival will require setting aside our hubris and coming to terms with environmental and social limits.
I think the reason that gardeners and small-scale farmers have such passion about their calling is that their deepest needs are satisfied. I am calling it beauty but it is more than that. It is fullfilling a longing.
Through interlocking explorations of climate change, existential crisis, class conflict, mass extinction and granular insights into energy and resource availability, this book lives up to its name. It is not just an explication of potential futures, but a guide to how we might navigate them.
The bugs and bacteria and fungi of the radical underground economy metabolize and redistribute every resource without judgment of identity and rank, some of it circled back to feed the roots of plants while aboveground leaves open towards the sun to harvest the primitive accumulation of 1% from which all the world’s wealth trickles down.
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.
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.
The more I divine the interweave of life and climate, the more awe I feel at the life around me. And this leaves me wondering what is possible for others. What might grow in the human psyche if such understanding were to exist at large?
Taken to its logical conclusion, a human-centred global rationality will be imposed and should you – a peasant farmer or indigenous laggard – get in their way, then you should be offered up to the socialist gods, for the greater good. Jump on board, Comrade, the future is waiting.
Vermonters need to conceive of their resilience as something that enables them to imagine new futures, not stand steady in ways of the past marked by homogenous identities that sometimes do more harm than help.
Limits are a necessary part of bringing about the life I long for, and of caring for the people, places, and futures we’ve all been entrusted to keep.
If the grounded sense of beauty Momaday derived from Kiowa cultural expressions is to play a role in shaping our response to social and ecological collapse, it will need a territory that can sustain it.
Maybe changing the world is not just about spreading relevant information, and acting on it… and more about building communities that can enable us to unlearn what stands in the way of change.
