We in the Transition movement in Australia pay tribute to Joanna Macy whose life and work continues to have a profound influence on many thousands of people in many continents over many decades. She was one of the great wisdom teachers of our time. The concepts and practices Joanna gave us are central to the Transition movement.
photo: Mary S
Her body of work is called by various names: The Work That Reconnects, Deep Ecology, Active Hope… In the early days (1970’s and early 1980’s) Joanna called it Despair and Empowerment work. That is when I (Mary) personally came across her work, through her book Despair and Empowerment in the Nuclear Age 1983.
There is such power in the notion of The Great Turning from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life-sustaining Society. (Joanna was also playful and would at times call it The Great Muddle-through). In the face of massive global challenges – like runaway climate change, nuclear war, or destruction of places we love on this planet – Joanna has given us a whole new way of responding: through the Spiral of The Work that Reconnects.
Joanna aged 96, died peacefully at home on 19 July 2025 after several weeks of home hospice care, surrounded by her loved ones and held in love, respect and gratitude by countless people around the world. Even in her dying, Joanna gifted us yet another lesson: how to die gracefully, honouring grief and gratitude, embracing ritual and beauty and poetry.
The Work That Reconnects Network was formed about 10 years ago to ensure that Joanna’s work would continue. On the Network web page they quote Joanna Macy:
The Work That Reconnects helps people around the world
discover and experience their innate connections with each other
and the self-healing powers of the web of life,
transforming despair and overwhelm
into inspired, collaborative action.
Read more about Joanna and The Work That Reconnects Network here https://workthatreconnects.org/
and view a beautiful 8-minute video tribute https://workthatreconnects.org/joanna-macy-in-memoriam/
photo: Mary S
Throughout her life Joanna modeled for us all the value of collaborating with others. She collaborated with John Seed, Pat Fleming and Aarne Naess to create the Council of All Beings practice and to write the book Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards a Council of All Beings 1988. Nearly forty years later, only a few months before she died, Joanna was on the phone with John Seed et al endorsing the proposal to create an audio version of the book.
Joanna collaborated with Molly Brown to write Coming Back to Life (1st edition 1998, updated edition 2014) and with Chris Johnstone to write Active Hope (1st edition 2012, Revised edition 2022). By the way Chris Johnstone is the psychologist interviewed by Rob Hopkins for chapter 6 in The Transition Handbook.
Joanna Macy brought us the Elm Dance and on The Work That Reconnects webpage you can view a video of Joanna participating in the Elm Dance.
On The Work That Reconnects webpage she wrote:
When I was with the people of Novozybkov, I made them a promise: to tell their story wherever I went. In keeping that promise, I shared the Elm Dance. Then, in a way that no one could have imagined, the dance in this form began to spread, beyond all reckoning, with a momentum of its own, and became associated with The Work That Reconnects.
We have come to realize that the dance gives activists and lovers of life the world over a tangible way to feel their solidarity with each other across the miles, and strengthen their bone-deep commitment to the healing of our world. Each time we put on the music and link hands, I think of Novozybkov in the fall of 1992.
Tributes from others:
Rob Hopkins (co-founder of the Transition movement)
I was deeply saddened to hear of the passing of the extraordinarily precious Joanna Macy, one of the great Boddhisattvas of our time. I had the huge honour to meet her twice, the first time being at the ‘Positive Energy’ conference at Findhorn. I met her again later when she visited Totnes and did an extraordinary talk for Transition Town Totnes in a packed St Johns Church. At that event at Findhorn she did the most extraordinary practice called ‘The Bowl of Tears’, which was profoundly extraordinary. Her capacity for holding and facilitating things like that was so inspiring to witness.
Reseed Centre, Penguin, Tasmania
Visionary thinker, ecologist and environmental activist, Joanna Macy, died on the 19th of July 2025. She was an American writer whose work intertwined Buddhist practice, systems thinking, and deep ecology. Over five decades, Joanna Macy became a leading voice on issues ranging from nuclear disarmament to climate justice. At the heart of her legacy lies her transformative methodology known as The Work That Reconnects. This spiral‑based experiential group framework has guided, and will continue to guide, participants through gratitude, grieving, shifts in perspective, and committed action to foster ecological awareness and collective resilience.
Rebecca Solnit:
The woman that was Joanna Macy is gone. And still here as books, teachings, in students, friends, and through broad influence even beyond those who know her and her work. She’s a tree that’s fallen; she’s a tree that trees have grown out of; she’s now part of the past, but also she fed and nourished and loved and guided a possible future, a hopeful and demanding future, demanding in that we would have to change ourselves and our society to make it. https://www.meditationsinanemergency.com/in-honor-of-joanna-macy-1929-2025/
Tim Hollo, the Green Institute:
Macy’s extraordinary entwining of despair and empowerment, mourning and action, facing the reality of where we are while insisting on the possibility that it could be better, it could be beautiful, is exactly what I need right now. I suspect you do, too.
You can read tributes from many others who’ve been deeply influenced by her work:
The Pachamama Alliance https://news.pachamama.org/we-are-the-great-turning
Australian mainstream media do not seem to have noticed, but here is the NY Times obit https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/climate/joanna-macy-dead.html
What is the Spiral of The Work that Reconnects?
image by Dori Midnight, created as a gift to Joanna Macy
It’s a way of responding to the planetary crisis we face.
It’s a rich and rewarding way to process this stuff together in a group.
It can also be a daily personal practice in response to daily news (rather than turning away, feeling numb or overwhelmed): First get in touch with gratitude for this beautiful earth; then honour our pain for the world; then find ways to “see with new eyes” (connect with future beings, ancestors, other species); then decide “Okay what is my next step towards the healing of the earth”.
Mary Stringer
August 2025