What if the mountains, rivers and plants are, in fact, our living ancestors? What if the land and forests are relatives, and not “resources” to extract and exploit? How would that knowledge inform the way we act moving forward? 

Get ready to explore your inner forests as we dive deep with Osprey Orielle Lake—international activist, changemaker, and author of The Story in Our Bones: How Worldviews and Climate Justice Can Remake a World in Crisis. A game changer in the canon of ecofeminism, Osprey draws on decades of her experience as founder and director of the Women’s Earth and Climate Action Network (WECAN) to bring forth the embodied solutions and stories we need to hear now more than ever. Osprey’s work teases out the root causes of our modern disease—the harmful dominant worldviews of patriarchy, white supremacy, human dominion over nature, and separation from a living Earth. She maps possible paths forward by retracing our origin stories back to ancient, life-sustaining principles. The Story in Our Bones looks to the marrow of things. Literally, we are made of stardust. We evolved from our elemental, plant, and animal ancestors as part and particle of one miraculous lifesystem. Osprey reminds us that within our bones “is a place of world-making, of creativity,” regenerative energy, and healing forces. From the atomic to the cellular views, Osprey takes us into more expansive knowledge systems that restore our kinship to this animate cosmology. How can remembering our earth lineage, the awe within our bodies, influence our policies, social structures and daily choices? Learn how we can be a life-enhancing, rather than life-destroying, species by returning to our origins and lifting women’s voices. Join us in summoning a new paradigm for being in the Anthropocene and beyond. 

4 Things you’ll learn in this episode:   

1. How both Osprey and I have been influenced by female iconography: sculptures that have led us to be curious and ask more questions about sacred connections. Osprey recounts that what started it all for her was a black clay statue of a goddess holding a stalk of corn in one hand, and the moon in the other. The circular nature between women, earth, protection, and planting began to emerge for her at the age of 8.
   
   
2. Systemic gender inequality means that women are impacted “first and worst” by environmental degradation, but women are also proving to be the keystone to the solutions we need.
   
   
3. In the Itombwe Rainforest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, a community of women earth defenders have created nurseries and reforested swaths of devastated lands with hundreds of thousands of trees – all by hand, without any technical equipment, in the course of 8 years. 
   
   
4. 80 percent of the biodiversity left on earth is in the lands and hands of indigenous peoples who are stewarding them. 

To buy her book and go deeper, visit: ospreyoriellelake.earth. To stimulate further thought and action, check out the reader’s guide: ospreyoriellelake.earth/readers-guide 

To find out more about Jodie Nelson and Female Frequency workshops go to pressreign.com and instagram.com/pressreign