Insight and inspiration in turbulent times.
We are showing why a new generation of farmers is turning away from conventional farming and choosing to work with nature to create resilient farming systems that do not rely on chemical inputs, heavy mechanisation and monocrops.
At the very moment when our survival demands a deep overturning of what we have long believed to be true and proper, settling for less will look like the crazier option.
So what is this Welsh cultural attitude and why does it matter so much in a book about the history of the landscape? In summary, it is the deeply held conviction that the land and its people are inextricably intertwined.
One day, when a new world rises from the ashes of this chemically-infused and churned and oil-burned wasteland, the basement of history, we may all work together to rebuild, to try again, and, most importantly, to love and to have better memories.
Biospheric cognition, when brightly lit, always places the biosphere first and central. Always. Biospheric cognition is a context in which understanding and meaning take place as the very biosphere itself (Herself) cognizing with and through us, awake or awakening to itself/Herself as us.
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?
