What if we need spiritual revival, not technology, to address climate change?

Buddhism scholar Joanna Macy, who died this month, leaves behind a blueprint for overcoming climate despair and anxiety.

For American scholar and activist Joanna Macy, who died at age 96 this month, early encounters with Buddhism changed not only the course of her career, but also popular understanding of how we might solve the most urgent environmental issues of our time. Today, her ideas are everywhere: in the language of protesters, in discussions at scientific conferences, even at the Vatican, where Pope Francis wrote his unprecedented 2015 encyclical on the environment, “Laudato Si’.”

Macy applied Buddhist teachings to help people understand that they were not free-floating individuals, but integral to a much larger whole composed of every living being across time, a network as real as our veins and arteries.

She encouraged people to acknowledge their feelings about the destruction of the natural world and turn their anxiety and despair into positive action. “The key is in not being afraid for the world’s suffering,” she told an interviewer. “Then nothing can stop you.”

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