A Mother Tree fell on 19 July 2025, at the age of 96. Joanna Macy was a scholar of deep ecology, systems thinking and Buddhist wisdom. She was an environmental activist, mother of three children, and author of seventeen books. She was a beloved teacher of many, guiding us to breathe through our grief for this world so that we may feel the strength of the pain as the strength of our love: strength enough to heal it. She was also our dear friend. Below, we add to the countless tributes pouring out from people’s heart-minds (as Joanna would say); testament to the deep-rooted and multi-branching legacy of our wonderful elder.
Words by Gaia’s Founding Co-Director, Liz Hosken.
I first met Joanna Macy in the late 1980s when she held a workshop on Despair and Empowerment in the UK: we were in the throes of a great nuclear threat at that time. Her art in asking questions that reached deep into our hearts was astonishing, and within a few hours people from all walks of life – including many who would not consider themselves ‘environmentalists’ – were voicing their pain for the Earth and what we were leaving of it for our children. As the tears flowed, we connected beyond our separate identities within a deep place of shared vulnerability. What was her magic, I wondered.
Later, Joanna helped us to make sense of where she had led us: to the core of our common human experience, as participants in an awe-inspiring web of life that animates our living planet. We are intimate relatives of a shared story of origin and as such, we feel the pain of each other, of our wild kin, and of our Mothering Earth when violated. This is an intelligence to be recognised, cultivated, and worked with, she said, as it enables us to be a fully functioning cell in our world. We feel grief because we feel love, and allowing ourselves to breathe through the pain draws us into presence, from where we can bring our fragmented selves back into wholeness and take meaningful action.
“You are not a separate being. You belong to the living body of Earth. You are the Earth, looking up at the stars.” Joanna Macy
- From our family photo album: Gaia Co-Founder Ed Posey with Joanna and her beloved husband, Fran, at Gaia House in the 1990s
Over many years of a life fully lived, Joanna gathered a range of potent processes to reawaken our capacity to feel part of Gaia; to honour our pain, feel grateful for life, and embrace our ability to heal our human-Earth relationship, no matter how dire things get. She generously shared her thinking and, in essence, her gift to the world is what she called The Work That Reconnects. This global network, in Joanna’s words, “helps people 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”.
Since that first meeting in the 1980s I have been honoured to work alongside Joanna and introduce The Work That Reconnects to allies in Africa. With her guidance, it is a central thread of Gaia’s Earth Jurisprudence Trainings, and has taken root among the African Earth Jurisprudence Collective: a constellation of Earth-centred practitioners reviving indigenous lifeways that has emerged from these trainings. Joanna’s approach is vital medicine with which we can overcome the separations created through colonialism and anthropocentrism in their many forms. Patterns of domination are deeply familiar and justified through superiority complexes of ideology, race, sexuality, gender, and religion. Yet, as we face death everywhere – of cultures, species, entire ecosystems — we have the opportunity to heal these wounds by coming back to ourselves as Earthlings, first and foremost. As Rebecca Solnit put in her moving tribute, “it’s almost strange to think about [Joanna’s] integrity, her compassion, her generosity at a time when the news is full of stories about cruel and corrupt men and the wreckage they’ve strewn all around them, but she’s a reminder that their opposite is also present in the world”. And as Joanna herself would remind us, “the darker the circumstance, the more brilliant the invitation”.
Joanna’s practices provide compelling ways in which people can feel part of a cross-cultural, cross-species consciousness. In this resonance lies solidarity. A companion to ever-widening circles of people across the planet, Joanna, through her teachings, will continue to kindle our commitment to this Earth community. Her departure from this dimension reminds us of the responsibility we all hold to sustain such a remarkable gift. As she said, “If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear”.
The many testimonies from those who knew her, and felt transformed by her work, bare witness to Joanna’s awesome capacity to be fully present with each one of us. Her incisive mind and radiant love was infectious. In later years she would remark “I am so grateful to be alive at this time when Gaia needs us to listen to her and do the work we are called to do to heal life.”
I am deeply thankful for Joanna’s accompaniment over so many years. It has been a privilege to know and learn from her. As we come to terms with her passing, I will continue our work in the comfort of her wisdom: that the sorrow felt for Joanna’s loss lays bare, beautifully, the love we shared in life.