ABSTRACT
Among environmental and social justice activists, Joanna Macy is widely known for her transformative trainings and activities in support of what she calls the Great Turning toward a Life Sustaining Society. In the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, this work helps people turn despair and apathy into constructive action. Over the past four decades Macy has trained thousands of people in these powerful methods in many countries around the globe. Her work is based in the central Buddhist principle of dependent co-arising or mutual causality, which she sees as the foundation for mutual morality, a social ethics of concern for all beings. She shows how the two nonlinear philosophies of Buddhism and Western systems theory are complementary and enlivening for her vision of the Great Turning. This vision is based in Earth consciousness, social collaboration and global greening through moral engagement. This chapter reviews the Buddhist and systems logics that lead to mutual morality and a heartfelt sense of mutual belonging with Earth. Macy’s call for such an ethic has resonated throughout her work from the early 1980s through the present. Now, in a time of social unrest and climate chaos, Macy sees the Great Turning as compass and map, a toolbox of skillful means, and the arising of bodhicitta mind to guide the journey.
