Joanna Macy

• Name — Joanna Macy • Birth Name — Mary Joanne Rogers • Born — 2 May 1929 • Birthplace — Los Angeles, California, U.S. • Died — 19 July 2025 • Place of death — Berkeley, California, U.S. • Relatives — * Hartley Rogers Jr. (brother) • Occupation — Author, Buddhist scholar, environmental activist

Macy was born Mary Joanne Rogers in Los Angeles on May 2, 1929, and was brought up in New York City. Macy credits poet and activist Muriel Rukeyser with starting her on the path to becoming a poet and writer herself. When she was a high school student in New York City, she cut school and took the train from Long Island to Manhattan in order to attend a poetry reading by Rukeyser; the hall was already full to capacity when Joanna arrived, but Rukeyser invited her to come onto the stage and sit at her feet during the reading. In 1953, she married Francis Macy, who died in 2009; the couple had three children. Macy graduated from Wellesley College in 1950 and received her Ph.D. in religious studies in 1978 from Syracuse University, Syracuse. Her doctoral work, under the mentorship of Ervin László, focused on convergences between causation in systems thinking and the Buddhist central doctrine of mutual causality or interdependent co-arising. Macy was an international spokesperson for anti-nuclear causes, peace, justice, and environmentalism, most renowned for her book Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World and the Great Turning initiative, which deals with the transformation from, as she terms it, an industrial growth society to what she considers to be a more sustainable civilization. She created a theoretical framework for personal and social change, and a workshop methodology for its application. Her work addressed psychological and spiritual issues, Buddhist thought, and contemporary science. In the early 1980s Macy and her family settled in the San Francisco Bay Area. She died in Berkeley, California, on July 19, 2025, at the age of 96, from complications following a fall.

Macy traveled giving lectures, workshops, and trainings internationally. Her work, originally called "Despair and Empowerment Work", was acknowledged as being part of the deep ecology tradition after she encountered the work of Arne Naess and John Seed, but as a result of disillusion with academic disputes in the field, she called it "the Work that Reconnects". She was affiliated with three graduate schools in the San Francisco Bay Area: as a research scholar at the Starr King School for the Ministry, as an adjunct professor at the University of Creation Spirituality, and as a member of the Council of Sages at the California Institute of Integral Studies.