Joanna Macy

Life and career Macy was born Mary Joanne Rogers in Los Angeles on May 2, 1929, and was brought up in New York City. 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.

Key influences Macy first encountered Buddhism in 1965 while working with Tibetan refugees in northern India, particularly the Ven. 8th Khamtrul Rinpoche, Sister Karma Khechog Palmo, Ven. Dugu Choegyal Rinpoche, and Tokden Antrim of the Tashi Jong community. Her spiritual practice was drawn from the Theravada tradition of Nyanaponika Thera and Rev. Sivali of Sri Lanka, Munindraji of West Bengal, and Dhiravamsa of Thailand.

Key formative influences to her teaching in the field of the connection to living systems theory were Ervin Laszlo who introduced her to systems theory through his writings (especially Introduction to Systems Philosophy and Systems, Structure and Experience), and who worked with her as advisor on her doctoral dissertation (later adapted as Mutual Causality) and on a project for the Club of Rome. Gregory Bateson, through his Steps to an Ecology of Mind and in a summer seminar, also shaped her thought, as did the writings of Ludwig von Bertalanffy, Arthur Koestler, and Hazel Henderson. She was influenced in the studies of biological systems by Tyrone Cashman, and economic systems by Kenneth Boulding. Donella Meadows provided insights on the planetary consequences of runaway systems, and Elisabet Sahtouris provided further information about self-organizing systems in evolutionary perspective. 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.

Writings