The Work that Reconnects

by Rosalind Dean

I had a friend who was one of the early professional architects to recognise the need for ecologically sound building.  She also had Multiple Sclerosis and died unexpectedly in her sleep.  When her daughter sent the message about Mary’s death, she described the book that was still on Mary’s bedside, ready to continue reading the next night.  It was called “Wild Love for the World”, a tribute to Joanna Macy.  To honour my friend, I downloaded it onto my tablet, and about 5 years later, got round to reading it.

I was absolutely blown away and could not imagine how I had never heard of Joanna Macy.  She has been working, teaching, writing and inspiring people, since the 1970s, right up until she died, in the middle of 2025.  She drew on Buddhism (theology and practice), systems theory (academic and practical) and engaged activism, starting with nuclear threats, and moving on to environmental concerns.  A distinctive feature of Macy’s work is that it does not separate intellect and emotions.  I would call her a visionary.

I recently wrote about Active Hope Training, which is one of the many offshoots from Joanna Macy’s work.  The training tries to help with the debilitating feelings of grief and despair that we can feel when we contemplate the devastating things that can happen in the world.  

However, this article is my attempt to present the philosophical and scientific underpinnings of Macy’s work, known as The Work that Reconnects.  They help us understand the world around us, with all its threats and violence, its hope and humanity.

The Work that Reconnects

The Work that Reconnects has at its heart the idea that the world and its life forms are all interconnected.  We are not just brains on sticks.  We are bodies that constantly interact with the world.  Every breath we take connects us with the air, whether it is fresh and pure or polluted, with chemicals and particulates from traffic and industrial processes.  Every morsel we eat has been created, ultimately, by the sun interacting with a myriad of life forms to create food that is edible and nutritious for us.  Every drop of bodily waste we produce is part of a gigantic recycling system.

Understanding how all the strands in the web of interconnectedness weave together is not quick or easy work, but it is potentially joyful and life-affirming.  And essential.

The Industrial Growth Society

The Industrial Growth Society is a description of the economic system we largely live in now.  One with ever increasing extraction, and consumption of resources.  Earth Overshoot Day was reached in 2025 on 24 July, the day in the year when humanity’s demands on nature surpass Earth’s capacity to replenish nature.  At the same time as taking, we are also excreting waste products, polluting our soils, air and water, as if the earth were a sewer. 

We are seeing destruction of life on a scale humanity has never experienced before: entire species are dying, whole cultures and global ecosystems.  And the suffering is immense.  Buddhism diagnoses the cause of suffering as greed, aggression and delusion.  These poisons are institutionalised in consumerism, industry, the military, and unfree media, to the extent that we may not want to blame only evil individuals.  Macy suggests we learn to free ourselves and others from this bondage. 

The Life Sustaining Society

The Life Sustaining Society is a vision of a future where we all have enough, shared fairly, without destroying our life support systems.  It asks what we really need to make us prosperous, with security, health, community, companionship and a future for our children, often coming high on the list.  Joanna Macy describes it as a great adventure.  It can certainly bring some of the rewards of a “good society” when we get together with an inspiring common purpose.  But first, we need to decide how we are going to look at things.

Choosing our story

Business as Usual is a story we hear from many of our leaders.   Wars, recession, extreme weather events, inequality, and drowning islands are little blips on the road to growth from which we shall surely recover, and even profit.

The Great Unravelling is what we tend to hear from environmental scientists and activists.  It shows compelling evidence for how dreadful things are, with systems collapsing all over the place.  It is an account backed by evidence, but can leave us paralysed by despair.

The Great Turning, as Macy describes it, is about making sure that disaster doesn’t have the last word.  Looking for ways to find and harness new and creative human responses to our current situation: joining together to act for the sake of life on earth.

Dimensions of The Great Turning

Three dimensions are suggested for The Great Turning.  The first is Holding Actions in Defence of Life, to slow the damage to Earth and its beings, as illustrated by the huge numbers of people and organisations that campaign in Sheffield for community renewables, better buses, making polluters pay, and local food production.

The second approach to the Great Turning is Transforming the Foundations of our Common Life.  We need to understand the underpinnings of corporate capitalism so that we can generate new systems and structures to free ourselves and our planet from the damage inflicted.  Initiatives like community wealth building or public interest companies.  We need to find new measures of wellbeing that encompass all aspects of our humanity, not just material wealth and possessions.

Finally, the Great Turning requires a Shift in Perception and Values.  This shift may come from our grief for the world, breakthroughs in science, inspiring wisdom traditions, or a recognition of our common humanity.  But we need to shift our sense of identity if we are to survive the socio-political and ecological traumas that lie before us.

Any of these dimensions might attract us at different times in our lives.  Like the world about us, we have a variety of strengths and interests that can ebb and flow.

The Greatest Danger

The greatest danger, in Joanna Macy’s view, is the deadening of heart and mind.  She fears the emotional impact of despair.  Those young people who feel they have no future and experience mental health issues.  Those activists who try so hard to make a difference and face burn out.  Those who cannot bear to think about it at all, and take refuge in denial or distraction.

She lists a great number of factors that contribute to this, mostly fears: of pain, despair, not fitting in, guilt, causing distress, but above all, our fear of powerlessness.  She also lists the costs of blocking out pain for the world.  Repression cuts us off from our best intelligence, our imagination, empathy, true self-preservation, love and learning.

Restoring these qualities is cultivated and encouraged by Active Hope

Coming Back to Life

A remarkable feature of this moment on earth may not be that we are on our way to destroying the world – we have been doing that for some time.  But that more and more of us are waking up to a whole new relationship to our world, ourselves and each other.  This worldview can embed us afresh in the web of life in which we exist.  “Coming Back to Life” is the title of one of Joanna Macy’s many books, this one co-authored with Molly Brown.  In this piece, I am summarising the first four chapters.

Living Systems Theory

Historically, science has tended to look for basic building blocks – things.  Increasingly, it seems as if the essence of the universe is energy and relationships – systems.  Wholes, like cells, bodies, ecosystems, and even the planet itself, are not just an assemblage of parts.  Rather, they are dynamically organised and intricately balanced systems, with certain properties.  These properties of self-organisation are described as follows.

Each system is a whole, with emergent properties that are different from the sum of the parts.

Open systems can maintain their own balance in the face of a changing environment, like our bodies regulate our temperature.

Open systems are able to evolve if they get feedback on persistent changes.  Though sometimes they cannot adapt fast enough and collapse.

Every system is a nested hierarchy, part of a bigger whole, and made up of smaller wholes.

I find this approach very exciting, both emotionally and intellectually, giving me an insight into things I have puzzled about over the years.  What appear to be separate entities can now be seen as interdependent and interwoven.  The web of life may not just be a metaphor, but a reality, with constant flow-through, giving and receiving feedback.  I find the image of the skeleton fun.  It is not an unchanging physical thing that exists, but a constant dance of calcium and other chemicals, moving in and out of our bones – healing them if necessary.

Ancient Spiritual Teachings

Personally, I resonate less with this approach, though I do see the congruence between Buddhism’s concepts of mutual causality and systems thinking.  But one aspect I do find myself drawn to is deep time, seeing ourselves as part of our evolutionary heritage.  Our lineage is part of a chain, stretching from what came before, our ancestors, to what will come after, distant future generations, not just to our own children and grandchildren.  But we are locked into a short-termshort term perspective that does not take   the whole chain into account.  This came home to me most forcefully in understanding that some of our nuclear waste needs to be safeguarded for hundreds of thousands of years.  Even plastics last for many generations.

The Miracle of Mind

The human mind is a classic example of a system, being composed of many layers of subsystems (atoms, neurons, cerebral nets) and being part of many other layers (family, community, nation).  It also consists of circuits of information, interconnecting and guiding living systems, and ultimately develops self-reflexive consciousness that can make choices.  At this point, I find myself trying to summarise ideas that I do not fully understand, so I leave it to you to pick up the thread if you want to.  The remaining headings in this section of the book “Coming Back to Life” are: self as choice maker, positive disintegration, we are the world.

The Nature of our Power

Just as our pain from the world arises from our connectivity, so does our power.  Not the familiar idea of power over, but power with other currents of matter, energy and information in our environments.  In the human world, this includes open relationships for the sharing of information, feedback, purpose, decision making, joy, capacities, action, synergy and grace.

Postscript

I have just been looking at some of the foundation documents for Extinction Rebellion.  The ideas and approaches seem very familiar.  I suspect that Joanna Macy was an influence on the way that the organisation tries to run itself, especially its Self Organising Systems, as well as its goals.  Regenerative-culture-extinction-rebellion-podcast

Resources

Coming Back to Life  The updated guide to The Work that Reconnects, Joanna Macy, Molly Brown, 2014, New  Society Publishers

The variety of resources available can be bewildering: books, online courses, in in-person learning events.  A basic starting point is https://workthatreconnects.org/new-to-wtr/  

A UK starting point is Work That Reconnects UK on Facebook

Other short introductions are

What is the Work That Reconnects?

Foundational Teachings

Three Stories of Our Times