Turning Season: Conversations with Changemakers in Our Adventure Toward a Life-Sustaining Society

Turning Season: Conversations with Changemakers in Our Adventure Toward a Life-Sustaining Society


Holistic Climate Action and the Stories in Our Bones (with Osprey Orielle Lake)

February 05, 2024

"I bow to Osprey in deepest respect and gratitude for her years of inspired activism and this brilliant book." - Joanna Macy


Once again, I agree wholeheartedly with Joanna Macy, this time about Osprey Orielle Lake and her new book, The Story is in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis. The book is packed with so much to learn from - stories, insights, strategies - and so is the conversation Osprey and I had.


Click Play to hear us dive into:


  • Osprey's experience working with indigenous communities, global leaders, systems thinkers, and climate justice activists
  • the importance of nonviolent direct action, and the ways it is becoming increasingly dangerous - specifically for land defenders in Latin America
  • the "time riddle" we're in: how do we change things as fast as possible, AND slow down enough to make the changes deep and lasting?
  • the worldviews that need to be dismantled, and the worldviews that we need to revive and strengthen, if we're to have a life-enhancing society
  • the Kawsak Sacha, or Living Forest Declaration, a vision, a worldview, a strategy, a demand, by the Kichwa people of Sarayaku, in the Ecuadorian Amazon
  • the loss of identity and belonging we experience when we don't have a healthy connection to long-ago ancestors, who were in right relationship with the land and within the web of life


plus more - and even then, just beginning to explore what Osprey shares in her book.

Listen in, let me know what you think, and get a copy of The Story is in Our Bones for yourself and for someone else you know whose heart is with us in the Great Turning.


Osprey Orielle Lake is the founder and executive director of the Women's Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN), where she works internationally with grassroots, BIPOC and Indigenous leaders, policymakers, and diverse coalitions to build climate justice, resilient communities, and a just transition to a decentralized, democratized clean-energy future. She sits on the executive committee for the Global Alliance for the Rights of Nature and on the steering committee for the Fossil Free Non-ProliferationTreaty. Osprey’s writing about climate justice, relationships with nature, women in leadership, and other topics has been featured in The Guardian, Earth Island Journal, The Ecologist, Ms. Magazine and many other publications. Osprey holds an MA in Culture and Environmental Studies from Holy Names University in Oakland and lives in the San Francisco Bay Area on Coast Miwok lands.


Learn more:


Show notes: turningseason.com/episode38.