What if we need spiritual revival, not technology, to address climate change
Even when not sitting cross-legged in Phnom Penh, that has served me well. At times, I can deeply observe moments or myself, catching what I would have otherwise missed. In journalism, where observing is the job, it has helped me follow the questions wherever they lead, trusting the answer is not what I already (think I) know.
For American scholar and activist Joanna Macy, who died at age 96 this month, early encounters with Buddhism changed not only the course of her career, but popular understanding of how we might solve the most urgent environmental issues of our time. Today, her ideas are everywhere: in the language of protesters, in discussions at scientific conferences, even at the Vatican, where Pope Francis wrote his unprecedented 2015 encyclical on the environment, 'Laudato si.'
Macy applied Buddhist teachings to help people understand that they were not free-floating individuals, but integral to a much larger whole composed of every living being across time, a network as real as our veins and arteries.
She encouraged people to acknowledge their feelings about the destruction of the natural world and turn their anxiety and despair into positive action. 'The key is in not being afraid for the world's suffering,' she told an interviewer. 'Then nothing can stop you.'
It was a philosophy she came to call the 'Work That Reconnects,' a practice, and an organization, that thousands around the world have turned to when overwhelmed by seemingly insurmountable problems.
Macy's blueprint for climate action holds that we will not be able to solve the climate issue, and its intertwined problems, with technology and policy alone. We need spiritual renewal.
It's notable that a dean of the modern environmental movement has come to an identical conclusion. Gus Speth, the co-founder of the Natural Resources Defense Council and the World Resources Institute, as well as the former dean of Yale's School of the Environment (where I studied), once considered biodiversity loss, ecosystems collapse and climate change to be the century's top environmental problems.
'I thought with 30 years of good science, we could address those problems,' Speth recently wrote by email. 'But I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed and apathy … and to deal with those we need a spiritual and cultural transformation, and we lawyers and scientists don't know how do that.'
Macy's own transformation began in the Himalayan foothills of northwest India.
Growing up, she had spent idyllic summers on her grandfather's Western New York farm, an escape from what she remembers as the 'hideously confining' concrete canyons of New York City. After graduating from Wellesley College in 1950, she briefly worked for the CIA in postwar Germany, before moving to India, where she helped resettle Tibetan Buddhist refugees. Her encounters with monks fleeing Chinese persecution, and the Buddhist religion, changed her life forever.
Returning to school in the mid-1970s, she earned a PhD in religious studies at 49. Her thesis, said Sean Kelly, a philosophy professor who taught with Macy at the California Institute of Integral Studies, was the first research explicitly connecting Buddhist teachings with Western systems theory.
'She looked at the Earth as a massive system of which we are a part,' Kelly said. 'The Earth is living through us and other species.'
Human identity, she argued, can't be separated from the natural world — with profound moral and practical implications for how we live.
During the Cold War, as nuclear weapons and waste spread around the world, Macy founded the Nuclear Guardianship project. Beyond opposing nuclear proliferation, she advocated for treating radioactive waste as a moral and cultural commitment that spanned generations. Rather than bury waste in underground tombs, she argued that societies should keep the waste in retrievable, visible storage, so future generations could monitor and maintain the safety of 'humanity's most enduring artifact' — expected to remain lethal for more than 10,000 years.
As environmental crises mounted, she saw despair and fear rising in those around her. Rather than escaping into what she called a false and premature peace of mind, she accepted the reality of suffering, even embracing it, as the only way to reclaim the freedom to act.
'That became, actually, perhaps the most pivotal point in … the landscape of my life: That dance with despair,' she said on the public radio show 'On Being' in 2021. 'To see how we are called to not run from the discomfort and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear, and that if we can be fearless, to be with our pain. … It only doesn't change if we refuse to look at it.'
Her argument was simple: Pain reveals what we love. The problem, she said, was when people imprisoned themselves in numbness or distraction to avoid the pain. 'Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response,' she wrote in her book 'World as Lover, World as Self.'
Her genius, said Monica Mueller, an environmental studies and philosophy professor at Naropa University, was translating this idea into a practice that anyone could pick up in one of her books or 'Work That Reconnects' workshops around the world. People, especially activists, found in her teaching an antidote to burnout and apathy in the face of brutal odds. 'I've seen that time and time again,' Mueller said. 'People come in [to these workshops], literally wailing publicly, and then have something move through them and suddenly they feel they can go on.'
As Macy grew older, she appeared to grow more pessimistic about our prospects of avoiding the worst of climate change and the collapse of industrial society — what she called the 'Great Unraveling.' That only redoubled her commitment to love the world and, if some of it was doomed, to give thanks for its beauty at every funeral.
Despite this drumbeat of destruction, and her own pain, she could see the first green shoots of a more life-sustaining society taking hold, what she referred to as the 'Great Turning.'
But hope didn't fit into her lexicon. The word doesn't exist in Buddhism's teaching, Macy taught, because it implies wishful thinking about the future, divorcing us from the present moment when we possess the power to act. Real hope, she countered, was a simple practice reliant on courage and imagination, not optimism.
When people asked if she thought this would be enough, she told them they were asking the wrong question.
'When you're worrying about whether you're hopeful or hopeless or pessimistic or optimistic, who cares?' she said. 'The main thing is that you're showing up, that you're here, and that you're finding ever more capacity to love this world because it will not be healed without that.'
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