Joanna Macy, who passed away at age 96 a couple of days ago, was a profound inspiration to many in the environmental activist world. Among other things, she taught us that “environmentalism” was about dedication to the world around us and the relations that constitute it, that it begins from the deep experience of concern and trouble that we have with it, and that it transforms our feelings for that world.
As she said in a 2017 interview with Dahr Jamail, “I’m doing this work so that when things fall apart, we will not turn on each other.” Since then, the “Great Unraveling,” as she called it, has only sped up, with pandemics, intensifying wars, and populist political movements demonstrating how humans have begun to “turn on each other” all the more. So the task to which she dedicated her life — the “Great Turning” from an earth-consuming, terminal-capitalist growth society to a life-sustaining civilization, and the “work that reconnects” and makes us capable of action toward it — continues. My longtime colleague and fellow eco-Buddhist Stephanie Kaza called Macy’s approach a “wild love for the world.” Naomi Klein, in an endorsement to the book of that title, described it as a lifelong answer to the question “How do we live in solidarity on this warming planet?”
Macy’s message was that the best way forward is by facing things in their nakedness. As she says in that same 2017 interview (which I strongly recommend), “When people find that they can, and want to, feel and know and tell what is happening to our world, that is so much sweeter and [more] liberating than the opposite. When people get integrated and find how good it feels, then they really want that more than the narcotic of ignorance and delusion, as painful as it is.”
Buddhist philosophy and practice helped her in this, as it has for many. This is because Buddhism encourages sitting with the emotions we feel in order to see how they connect us to everything else, not just in the vague generality of “all things being one” but in the specificity of this, that, you, me, and every situation and intentional action. If this, then that. If not this, then not that.
If there’s a joyful message that Buddhism conveys, at least in its life-affirming Mahayana forms, it is that this moment and every moment provides an opportunity to pierce through delusion and act in ways that bring forth beauty and a sense of solidarity with all sentient beings. Here we are (whoever and whatever “we” may be), in this together, with the capacity to act from this recognition of our togetherness.
