Joanna Macy

American environmental activist, author, and scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology, who was the author of twelve books. She was married to Francis Underhill Macy, the activist and Russian scholar who founded the Center for Safe Energy.

Macy graduated from Wellesley College in 1950 and received her PhD 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 has created a theoretical framework for personal and social change, and a workshop methodology for its application. Her work addresses psychological and spiritual issues, Buddhist thought, and contemporary science.

Joanna Macy died on 19 July 2025 at age 96 in Berkeley, California.