JOANNA MACY RECONNECTS
SUBJECT Joanna Macy
OCCUPATION Writer and facilitator
INTERVIEWER Nathan Scolaro
PHOTOGRAPHER Adam Loften
LOCATION Berkeley, US
DATE August, 2019
Joanna Macy began engaging deeply with this moment of reckoning we’re facing, a period she has coined “the great turning,” more than 60 years ago—long before we had any of the climate science we have today. A true pioneer in resilience thinking, she saw early on that human impact on the planet, and in particular the consumer growth mindset brought about by capitalism, was creating deep-rooted trauma, and in ways that weren’t typically visible to the everyday person. She made it her life’s work to enliven, through writing and group workshops, people’s desire and ability to take part in the planet’s healing. “Of all the dangers we face,” she wrote, “from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response.”
Joanna’s teachings, now renowned as “The Work That Reconnects,” have touched thousands of people around the globe, with the aim of helping them trust their raw experience and give voice to what they see and feel is happening to their world. Having forged an unparalleled career, which included stints with the CIA in Cold War Europe and the Peace Corps in post-colonial India, Joanna went on to become a scholar in systems theory and Buddhism, bringing all of it together in her work to inspire the social courage and moral imagination that she saw would be needed at this time. Now in her 90s, Joanna continues to speak to the possibility of this moment for a more loving and life-giving planet. It doesn’t have to be our unravelling, she observes, if we let go of the systems that have kept us small and re-learn what it means to look after one another.
NATHAN SCOLARO: The
