23-07-2025
Joanna Macy, Who Found a Way to Transcend ‘Eco-Anxiety,' Dies at 96
Joanna Macy, a pioneer in facing the emotional stress caused by climate change, who wrote books and led workshops on what became known as eco-despair or eco-anxiety, died on Saturday at her home in Berkeley, Calif. She was 96.
Her family said the cause was complications of a fall.
Ms. Macy was not a psychotherapist; she was trained in religious studies and systems theory. She drew from those fields, as well as her practice of Buddhism, to propose a way past the heartbreak and hopelessness that many people feel when contemplating the extinction of species, the degradation of natural places and the threats to human life on a warming planet.
One of her fundamental insights was that what lies at the root of people's despair over the environment is a reverence for the earth's magnificence and an understanding that human beings are part of the web of life.
'You have to allow yourself to experience the love that is underneath the horror,' she told The San Francisco Examiner in 1999, when very few others were talking about the psychic toll of knowing that humans could irreparably damage the biosphere.
At the time, psychotherapists largely dismissed the notion of eco-anxiety — the idea that climate change could cause people who were merely following the news to experience anxiety or despair. Today, the Climate Psychology Alliance offers a directory of hundreds of climate-aware therapists.
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