The Story Is in Our Bones

How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis

Osprey Orielle Lake, New Society Publishers (JAN 30) Softcover $29.99 (400pp) 978-0-86571-994-1, BODY, MIND & SPIRIT

Comprehensive and inspiring, The Story Is in Our Bones reviews how women, Indigenous people, and other activists across the globe are working to counter climate change and protect ecosystems.

In this persuasive book, Osprey Orielle Lake asserts that the dominant worldview— described as capitalist, colonialist, patriarchal, and extractive—is the main culprit for environmental destruction. Examples include a global beverage company depleting Indian aquifers and petroleum producers that destroy boreal forests to extract Albertan oil sands. Lake denounces the “commodification and financialization of Mother Earth” and urges “humans, governments, and corporations” to “learn to live within planetary boundaries and reciprocity.” She argues that a more fundamental heritage is “in our bones”— preserved in Indigenous stories and culture.

With an optimistic tone, the book catalogs hundreds of examples of people who have “taken back the right” to environmental decision-making. Dozens of local initiatives are described, including Rights of Nature legislation that modified Ecuador’s constitution and helped protect a vital riverway and cloud forest from development, and La Vie Campesina, which brings together small-scale farmers from more than eighty countries to focus on biodiversity and climate justice.

Reflecting her leadership role as an environmental activist and reformer, Lake writes knowledgeably about an astonishing array of ecological initiatives on every continent. She also integrates examples from her own life, such as her grandmother’s stories about her Ukrainian homeland, including “planting” an intricately decorated egg in sown fields to call forth a good harvest.

Filled with countless examples of women and Indigenous people reclaiming their power, The Story Is in Our Bones shares a hopeful, creative vision for Earth’s future.