Unknown's avatar antlerboy - Benjamin P Taylor 9:04 am on July 20, 2025  

RIP Joanna Macy

Phoebe Tickell’s facebook post begins: “Joanna Macy died peacefully in her sleep at 3:56pm PST on the 19th July, at home, surrounded by family and friends.”

[I do not know Macy’s work terribly well – and the best place to go for references and remembrances is probably Phoebe’s post. From Facebook posts, I understand that Phoebe – a great and appropriate student of Joanna’s – was helping to care for her and live for her in her final weeks. I’ve attempted with some LLM help to assemble some links and connections which people might find interesting].

Joanna Macy (1929–2025) was a pioneering scholar and activist who integrated Buddhism, systems thinking, and deep ecology to address ecological and social crises. Her work is deeply connected to systems theory, cybernetics, and complexity science.

Core contributions:

  • Mutual causality: Macy explored the Buddhist concept of dependent co-arising (paticca samuppada) alongside general systems theory, highlighting the interdependent nature of systems. She emphasised that systems are dynamic patterns of interaction, not isolated entities.
  • The Work That Reconnects: This framework helps individuals transform despair into action by recognising their interconnectedness with all life. It incorporates systems thinking to foster ecological awareness and collective responsibility.
  • Despair and empowerment: Macy acknowledged that feelings of despair about global issues are natural and can be a source of energy for change when understood within the context of interconnected systems.

Connections to systems, cybernetics, and complexity:

Macy applied principles from general systems theory, such as feedback loops and self-organization, to understand ecological and social systems. She viewed the world as composed of nested systems, each influencing and being influenced by others. Influenced by thinkers like Gregory Bateson and Ervin László, Macy incorporated cybernetic concepts, particularly feedback mechanisms, into her understanding of ecological and social dynamics. Macy’s work aligns with complexity science through its focus on emergent properties, nonlinearity, and the interconnectedness of systems. She emphasised that small changes can have significant impacts within complex systems.

Macy’s integration of these disciplines offers a holistic approach to understanding and addressing the challenges of our time, emphasising the importance of interconnectedness, feedback, and systemic thinking in fostering a sustainable and compassionate world.

Part of the reason I’m sharing this is just to recognise that each time a major influential thinkers like Macy leave us, this marks a significant transition point in the systems | cybernetics | complexity world. In this case, the tradition clearly continues and lives and thrives – in many other people but very significantly in Tickell’s work. She was trained and mentioned by Macy and describes her transition from a biology researcher at Imperial to applying Macy’s approach in activism: “experiencing grief due to the destruction of our planet is… a consequence of being part of a system where something is deeply wrong,” echoing Macy’s notion of despair as essential feedback in living systems. Tickell credits Macy for inspiring her framing of “The Great Unravelling”—a term borrowed from Macy—that highlights society’s fracturing stories and the need for new narratives, and also traces the modern use of “Moral Imagination”, as a practice-oriented concept, rooted in collective imagination for systemic change, to Macy’s teachings.

Links – in no particular order – on Macy’s work and the impact she had on folks