This is quite an event. To have an organisation like COIN, Climate Outreach and Information Network, come to birth, and to have it bring the kind of experience that George Marshall and others are bringing to it, helping us be present, fully present, to what is happening in our world. We all know about climate change in one way or another, but to come to it with fresh eyes, fresh mind, fresh heart, and bring the kind of energy that I see here, is quite wonderful. I feel very glad to be here, and very grateful too for the beautiful music from Chris and Melski [music in introduction].

I would like to begin with the protocol of the Iroquois federation for opening their meetings when they were making peace treaties with member nations of their six nation confederacy, Haudenosaunee, and there’s seven parts to it that involve the body. You don’t have to stand up but you get more out of it if you stand up.

The Iroquois federation, or the Haudenosaunee, as they call themselves, are well known for their regard for the future generations. As you may know, they never came to a decision without having explored together its implications, or how it will effect members of the seventh generation. For them, they can see it as the same world as they were living in, the same clear skies, the same clean water, the same trees and lights and soils and brother–sister beings. But for us, we seem not to want to contemplate the world that is coming after us. It seems that we don’t want to contemplate the world that will be there for the seventh, or even the second or third generation in the wars that we wage, the wastes that we dump. We build more motorways, more cars, more planes, more airports. We pursue this out of control industrial growth society, with its ever shorter term span of vision, looking at how the profits made in this quarter compare to the last quarter–a very close time span.

So the future seems progressively to disappear from our awareness. A friend of mine was teaching in a high school class about nuclear weapons and nuclear waste and their effect on future generations. A high school student stood up and said to her “well what has the future ever done for me?”

“What has the future ever done for me?” How do you answer that? And yet our effect right now on the future is becoming ever clearer, with new reports that climate change will have an effect that almost beggars the imagination if we let ourselves let in that information.

I am so impressed that here in Great Britain you actually have this reported in the press. In contrast to my own country–we do report it but it is couched in terms of great uncertainty as if it is still the subject of scientific debate.

Here are two recent reports from your country. I read the first one before I came, in the wonderful email newsletter that Chris Johnston produces, The Great Turning Times [1]. It is by Michael McCarthy, Environmental Editor of the Independent, in February 2005, when he has just come back from a meeting in Exeter to discuss the UN Third Assessment Report on Climate Change. He takes pains to point out that they were all scientists there, rather than environmental activists, as if these were less trustworthy. They reported that their expectations about the progress of climate change were far exceeded in the last couple of years since the Third Assessment Report of the UN in 2001. There are two new threads: one, the science that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet is starting to break up, and should that collapse into the ocean, the global sea level would rise by more than 16 feet. “Goodbye London,” he says, “goodbye Bangladesh”. Only four years ago the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said that this West Antarctic Ice Sheet was safe for another thousand years.

The second alert had to do with the growing acidification of the oceans. The billions of tonnes of carbon dioxide produced by our society dissolves in sea water and produces carbonic acid which affects thousands of species of smaller marine organisms at the bottom of the food web, from plankton to shell fish. Of course plankton are necessary to the oxygen we breathe, and these cannot live in an acid sea. These pieces of evidence were based not on computer models, but on actual observation.

The other report came out yesterday in The Sunday Times [2]. There was a half page article titled 'Britain faces big chill as the ocean current slows’. It quotes the report of Peter Wadhams, professor of ocean physics at Cambridge, who hitched a ride on submarines under the Arctic ice sheet, and through sonar measured the thickness of the ice sheet. He saw that since 1970 it had lost 46% of its thickness–almost half as thick in just a quarter of a century.

So it's pretty clear what’s happening, and it is bafflingly hard for us, the general public, to take this in a way that we can respond to, because it depends on our response, each one of us, and no expert, no authority in the government is going to be able to change our lifestyle but us. Recent polls show that 90% of Americans are aware of climate change–global warming–and consider it important. But when it comes to priority issues, that they consider urgent, then it is not even in the top ten. There’s crime, the economy–issues that are much more important for them.

It makes me think of these time management studies and guides that help us see the difference between what we consider as important, and what we consider urgent. We will do what is urgent, but we let go what is important and let our time get absorbed by the urgency. I’m just going to list, for us to reflect on, why climate change is so hard for us to really take in at a level that we can act.

Of course, it seems so remote, because of the time lags. The warming that we experience now arises from fossil fuel usage over centuries. What our children and grandchildren will be experiencing is from what we are using now. So this is what we call a creeping disaster–slow of onset, of long term consequences, with small, cumulative processes. Once we see the symptoms, it is actually too late.

In addition to the temporal distance between cause and effect, there is also a geographic one. The people who are producing the most emissions in the north are distant from those experiencing some of the worst effects.

The media also exaggerate the degrees of uncertainty, and actually produce a lot of confusion on the part of the public. According to the N.R.D.C. (National Resources Defence Council), the media tend to portray the climate change issue as one of large uncertainties filled with competing claims and intense debate within the scientific community. The scientific community isn’t that divided, but thanks to phoney think tanks funded by the oil companies, there are always contrary views. These are treated by the media as if they are worthy of a balanced treatment.

This reinforces the public’s perception of uncertainty and leads to confusion. Individuals are left with overwhelming, frightening images of potentially disastrous impacts, no clear sense of how to revert this potentially dark future, and therefore no way to direct urgency to remedial action. The perception of global warming is that it is uncertain, controversial, far off in the future and out of the public’s hands.

One of my favourite journals, The Ecologist, reported that the U.S. delegation at a world conference on disaster reduction pushed to have all references to global warming removed from a U.N. action plan. The head of the delegation said that he didn’t want such a controversial issue as global warming to distract people at the meeting. U.S. lobbyists have even taken on Sir David King, your Chief Scientific Advisor to the Prime Minister on this subject, calling King an “alarmist with ridiculous views, who knows nothing about climate change”. This is the kind of lie with impunity that we are living with, so you can extend a little compassion to us activists over on the other side of the Atlantic. However this is presented–in the media, or whether you’re looking at a full, unvarnished report–there’s the sense that this problem is just too much. “I can’t do anything about it.” “It’s a shame but I’ve got to hurry and I don’t have time for it”.

When you’re just exposed to reports and frightening images, the response is one of fear, and fear is a lousy motivator–and so is guilt. The N.R.D.C. says that surveys have shown that one common response to information about the threats of climate change is the desire to buy a big Sports Utility Vehicle (S.U.V.), as a means of protecting oneself against unpleasant and unpredictable environments!

It can be dangerous to work from fear. I know from my work in the anti-nuclear movement that it is a great temptation to just pile on terrifying information, but this is very counter productive. It activates the reptilian brain, which we needed in our evolution, and it activates the responses of fight, flight or freeze. What is an appropriate response to it? Stick our heads in the sand? Go freeze and stop all mental activity? None of these are particularly appropriate to the enormous challenge of climate change.

Climate change is not just one competing issue among many, but it is integral to the whole transition that we’re in, from a self-destructive political economy to a life-sustaining economy. One of the problems is how to excite people and get them enthusiastic about keeping something from happening. Well things aren’t that great, so to march out, banners flying, to keep things the same, where success is seen as averting something–how do you do that? I’m going to propose from my work in social change movements, and particularly the anti-nuclear movement, that we can be called to something positive. We can be called to the creation of a life sustaining civilisation, and all of you is engaged in one way or another in this transition.

Work on climate change is not served by playing upon our fear or guilt but by an enthusiastic release of creativity and ingenuity such as happens when we feel ourselves called forward on a great adventure. Then, the uncertainty is something that we can take in our stride. We don’t know whether we’ll survive. We don’t know how bad it is going to be. We don’t know whether there’s going to be a new Ice Age. We don’t know whether the British Isles will be as cold as Siberia. The very nature of an adventure is not knowing the outcome. Frodo and his gang, in Lord of the Rings, head off on wonderful adventures where again and again it seems there’s absolutely no hope. But it is just at that point where there’s no hope that you band together with tighter loyalty to each other and tighter commitment to the task at hand.

The very nature of an adventure is not knowing the outcome, and the very nature of a joyous adventure is not needing to know the outcome. When we make the positive commitment to a life serving society, that summons up the blood and unblocks our root chakra, our muludhara releases, and helps us experience again our erotic connection with life itself. There’s no tepidity, no lukewarm sitting on the sidelines saying “it's not urgent enough,” when we feel our erotic connection with the living body of earth of which we are a part, with each other, with life itself. In order to convey that quality of response, I want to read you a response by a young colleague of mine, Drew, from Oakland, California, who’s a rap poet and a member of our study action group on depleted Uranium.

This is what I mean about what we can release around climate change. Drew says:

So there is a great adventure under way, and it's not just about averting disaster and keeping things the same, keeping ourselves safe. It’s a risky adventure. People who’ve really influenced me call this transition that we’re in–from a self-destructive society to the life-sustaining society that is emerging–the third revolution of our human story. The first revolution was the agricultural revolution, and that took centuries. The second revolution was the industrial revolution, and that took generations, sometimes just decades with technology transfer. Now on the heels of that comes the ecological revolution, or some call it “the sustainability revolution,” and some of us call it “The Great Turning.” We imagine that future generations, looking back at us right now in the time we’re living in will say, “oh those ancestors back then, 2003-2005, they were doing the Great Turning.”

So it’s under way, and I want to just suggest ways that we can see that it is under way. You can see it in your own lives first, but just knowing it is happening will not mean that it will succeed–that it will kick in and hold the pattern of human relationships with earth and climate before the systems unravel. We don’t know that, but it still is happening.

And–just pause a minute, because this is so important to the psychology of social and environmental activism–we don’t need a guarantee of success. I know so many people, at least in my culture, who could step in and get involved and engage themselves, but they hold back because they feel that “I’m not sure that I would make a great difference”. Well I tell you nobody’s sure they’re going to make a great difference. You don’t need that comfort of knowing that you’ve saved the situation. That’s not what it's about. It's about the commitment that we’re ready to make.

There’s no guarantee when we fall in love with someone that it’s going to be an enduring committed relationship, is there? And is there a guarantee that when we plant seeds in the soil that there’s going to be enough sun and rain to grow a bumper crop? When we go into labour for the birth of a child, is there any guarantee that we’re going to have a healthy child? No, there never is.

And if there were a guarantee (and there isn’t) that’s not what will bring forth from us our greatest creativity and courage. It’s that edge of not knowing that can bind us in such a solidarity together as we act. That sense of pride and support of each other as we engage in something whose outcome is not already predetermined.

I’d like to just look with you at the three areas where we can see the Great Turning happening. I wrote about this in my book Coming Back to Life [3], but the problem with writing it down in a book is that on a printed page first you read this, then you read that, and it can seem sequential, or it can seem an order of importance. It’s great that you are not reading it, you are just hearing about it. You can hear it and write it on your body and see it as interdependent. So on our hands we’ll write the first dimension, holding actions: all the activity–legal, political, legislative, and regulatory–to slow down the destruction of the industrial growth society.

As you know, this society is, by its very existence, unsustainable, because it has to keep growing. Growing in what? Health? Longevity? Wisdom? Beauty? It grows in corporate profits and those have to keep on growing. That’s what it measures its success by. It is by nature on a runaway system, on a need for exponential growth, an accelerating growth rate. That’s why it is destroying itself. That’s why it has gone beyond the point of no return in the resources it extracts from the body of earth, and beyond the point of what the earth can absorb in the wastes that it pours into the earth, treating the earth as a storehouse and as a sewer. It's gone beyond the limits. It’s on overshoot. It’s gone. That’s why this present political economy is doomed.

On its way out the destruction is huge. So much of activism in that first dimension is to slow down the destruction. It’s very important because that buys time, it saves some lives, some species, some ecosystems. It saves some of the gene pool for the life sustaining society to come.

But it’s not enough. It’s not enough because you have to have the structures, the organisations, the patterns that are sustainable. Those are happening too. Those are being created. Those are rising like green shoots through the rubble of a dysfunctional civilisation.

That’s the second dimension of the Great Turning, and we can write that on our foreheads because it takes so much ingenuity. New ways of owning the land. New ways of growing and distributing the food, which are often very old ways retrieved. New ways of measuring wealth and prosperity and indices of sustainability. New ways of generating renewable energy production. New forms of education. New forms of healing. Again, some of them are very old ways.

But this second dimension–the emergence and creation of Gaian structures–is still not enough for the Great Turning. These will shrivel and die if they are not deeply rooted in our values and our understanding of who we are and what we are in relation to each other and in relation to the living earth. In this dimension–we can write it here on the heart/mind–we can call it a shift in consciousness.

This is happening at a great rate of speed, and you have experienced this in your lives in the same way as the other dimensions too. We see it coming out of science and the systems view which helps us to see that the universe is made up of relationships and interdependent reciprocities. We see it in the resurgence of spiritual traditions offering us images and stories and ways of understanding and practices for realising this interdependence. We find it in the voices of the ancient ones, the Indigenous and Aboriginal Peoples (just as we opened with the practice of the Hadanashawni), and the voices from women’s spirituality and Buddhist traditions. We see it in the upsurge of understanding of our interdependence that we call deep ecology. Each of us has the capacity to return, to retrieve a deep sense of kinship with all life forms, to break free of a shrunken sense of the self–small and separate and needing to consume endlessly–into one whose self-interest is contiguous with the living planet's itself.

The three dimensions overlap, and you can go in one way with an action and find yourself in another dimension. My friend John Seed told how he was in a holding action to defend a piece of rainforest whilst an environmental impact statement was winding its way through the courts in Sydney. In that moment as he stood there facing the loggers, the screaming chainsaws, the police with their paddy wagons and their bullhorns–at that moment, when he had nothing but his body and his buddies there, he had a kind of an epiphany of who he really was. He said that he realised that “I’m not John Seed, I realised that I was the rainforest defending itself through this little piece of humanity that I had cradled into existence”. That shift in who we are–that shift in identity–is powerful. Can you sense the difference that that shift would bring? When you know that nothing can stop you, you’re going on a power that is bigger than your own, these come around, and each part of it can lead to that shift in consciousness.

When I think about climate change, I think about holding actions. One of the things I would love to see happen is an education campaign to help people see that new nuclear power plants are not the solution to climate change. On the contrary. Some of us have known that for quite some time, and there are new handy reports available through World Information Service on Energy [4] in Amsterdam which are very easy to use in letters to the editor, talking to groups and in organising.

New structures include every form of alternative energy production and use, new forms of building, and the structures that allow lower carbon emissions. A new structure I would love to see is a green entrepreneur go into a revival of sea travel. I don’t want to give up coming here, but when I tried to give up flying I couldn’t find a way to go by sea. Even though we humans on planet earth have been plying the seas since the Etruscans and before, we’ve suddenly come to a point in our history where we cannot go from point A to point B by sea [5].

The third dimension of the shift in consciousness is an arena of climate change where we can act immediately: within our own consciousness, within our families, communities, organisations, and we see how systems science, spirituality, and art each play a necessary role. I’ve mentioned how tremendously nourishing and inspiring the systems view can be. I have built my own activism on understanding the deep ecological structure of our biology and our minds. It’s not a question of what you as an individual can do about climate change–or rather it is a question, but one that is not only to be measured by the acts of your life.

We act on behalf of, and amplified by, a sense of profound interconnectedness of our community, to develop a new relationship with space and time. You can feel that in Drew’s rap poem, this sense of our interconnectedness with peoples around the world, and with peoples of all times, and with the journey of our planet, and the sense of our openness to the future–that the future’s here, and that we’re able, we have it in us to commit to something longer than our individual lives. This is emerging now and is perfect for helping us harness the issue of climate change.

Here’s a poem that conveys that. It’s by an American poet, Sue Silvermarie [6]

Of course the spiritual traditions are there for us, to remind us again that the life living through us began before our birth and links us to all beings, and that there is a power in that that can buoy us. These spiritual traditions–that is those ones that don’t separate us from earth, positing some rapture that will lift us off this earth–open us to our mutual belonging in earth and our shared vulnerability, and our shared capacity to transform. To see this is a true and joyous adventure. So I would like to share with you a teaching from a spiritual tradition. Those of you who have worked with me in the workshops will know that it inspires a lot of the work I do. It comes from the Tibetan Buddhist tradition, and it’s a prophecy that is twelve centuries old.

I want you to hear it as if it were about you, because I believe it is about all of us. As a matter of fact, there is a Tibetan community that has been a very important part of my life, living in exile in North West India. It was there, when I went back on one of my frequent visits, that I heard people say that this prophecy was twelve centuries ago, and now it seems to be happening, in our time, and I said “wooah what is it about?” and they said it’s about a very difficult time for all Earth. Well, I’m pretty apocalyptic by nature–this was the 1980s and Ronald Reagan had just been elected, and I wanted to know. So this is the version of that prophecy that was given by my Dharma brother Choegyal Rinpoche, and I share it with you as this gives you a taste of the adventure and our capacity for it.

Let me just say that in this prophecy, which is the coming of the kingdom of Shambhala, you will hear the phrase ‘Shambhala warrior’, which refers to you, which is used as a metaphor for the bodhisattva in Buddhist thought and practice.

Then Choegyal Rinpoche said to me, “Joanna, mark this, the Shambhala warriors know that they can dismantle these weapons because they know these weapons are manomaya, ‘mind-made’. They are made by the human mind and they can be unmade by the human mind, because the dangers we face are not visited upon us by some extra terrestrial power, or by some satanic deity, or by some inexorable, immutable fate. They arise from our ways, from our relationships and priorities, our values, our habits. They are made by the human mind so they can be unmade by the human mind.”

So he said now is the time that the Shambhala warriors go into training. And I said “how do they train?” “They train in the use of two tools or weapons,” he said. “What are they?” I asked, and he held up his hands, the way they hold up ritual objects in the great lama dances of his people. He said “one is compassion, and the other is pacha–insight into the radical interdependence of all phenomena. And you need both, you need the compassion because that provides the motive power to get out to do what you need to do, to be where you need to be”.

Compassion means not being afraid of the suffering of our world. And when you’re not afraid of the pain of the world, then nothing can stop you. You can be where you need to be, to do what you need to do. By itself, compassion is very hot, it can burn you out, so you need the other, the cool knowledge of the dependent co-arising of all things. With that knowledge of the inter-being, or the deep ecology of all things, you know that this is not a battle between the good guys and the bad guys, because the line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart. They are so interwoven in the web of life, that even the smallest act with clear intentions has repercussions we can barely begin to discern. But that by itself is kind of cool, so you need the heat of the compassion. Those of you who have seen the moving hand gestures of Tibetan monks chanting, that’s what they’re doing, likely as not, the dance of compassion and wisdom.

So I see that both of these have everything to do with our being able to take in the reality of climate change, and respond with each other collectively in a creative and wondrous way. That first one, not being afraid to see the pain, not being afraid of the suffering of our world, is one we turn from so easily. It's particularly true in American culture, because as Lyndon Johnson said during the Vietnam war, “don’t bring me a problem, unless you bring me a solution”. We don’t want to be with painful information without some way of making it go away–some technical fix. But that‘s not where the true adventure is or where the truly creative response arises. You have to be with that, unafraid of seeing, unafraid of looking at what is happening to our world, with these mighty changes, temperature and chemical composition, of global warming, and these mighty changes of seasons and the migrations of animals and birds, to see it together. We can’t do this alone.

So here’s a poem that speaks to this capacity to see into the dark, by Rilke, from his Book of Hours. This collection of conversations with God is imbued with the sense that the twentieth century would bring great dangers and great suffering, and great challenges. Now at this point in the collection, with this poem, God seems to merge with Earth, and he’s talking to Earth itself. I’m going to say the first line in German so that you can get the sounds, the illiterate sounds that convey the sadness of it like a drumbeat:

“Du dunkelInder Grund”

Then he says:

See what he’s done there. He doesn’t just say give me a little more time because I’ve got a great idea and I’ve just got a grant from the Rockefeller foundation and I’ve got this strategy, and I’ve got this...

Can we respond to danger like that? Not with a sense that we’re going to keep something from happening so we can go back to the way things were. But can we dance with the dangers that face us and help them lift us up to create, out of our love for this planet and our life, to love the things, that which is worthy and real?

Each of us has that. There are ways each of us loves the world and loves the gift of life that is different from anybody else. This is a response to climate change too, and it is deep, and it means that you’re open to the way your brain works, the way your heart works, the way you connect with people. You come alive. And boy, watch out, just watch out! When the people of planet earth come alive! When they free themselves from the small shrunken knowledge of what the consumer society wants to tell us we are. Watch out when we taste our love, and act on it, and reach out for others, and decide that there’s a future that is worth having, not just the same old thing, not just pushing back this climate change, but letting it be the vehicle by which we create what is worthy of us.

I have to give one more poem from Rilke, because translating Rilke with my co-translator over the last ten years has been about the happiest thing I can do. Find the secrets of your happiness–it’s very important as an activist. Here’s a message from that same collection, and it has become kind of a theme song for the deep ecology movement:

(so now God’s speaking)

Now before I finish I want to talk to you, straight out of my experience, about a way of taking action on a big issue that I want to recommend. It’s really important when you’re facing something big, and something dark, and something horrific–and surely the scenarios of climate change qualify for that– to not look at it alone. Don’t do it! It’s too much to bear. Join–create with your friends–a study action group, pick up the phone, talk to them over the back fence, or at church or whatever, and say “I want to look at this issue and I wonder if you would like to join with me for–make it time limited now–for say 4 or 6 months. Would you be interested in doing that, or coming to a preliminary meeting?”

“Oh but I’m not an expert on climate change,” you say. That’s just it. We don’t want the experts, we are going to teach each other. Now you happen to have with COIN an organisation that can give you information, but it’s important to teach each other. The three times I’ve done this in my life–with global trade agreements, with nuclear waste, and with depleted uranium–those were three different topics, three different groups at different times of my life, were transformational. When we look at this we become each others teachers, we rotate facilitatorship. Somebody says “Next Monday, I’ll be the one. We’ll read this together,” or “I'll facilitate or give a report”.

The one we have going now, and I’m missing a meeting in Berkeley, has the same magic. By looking at things together, and becoming each other's teachers, there is a great intensity of bonds formed, of respect and something very close to love. To produce something together is also important. In this case we did a fact sheet, and we’re hoping to hold a public meeting, and we’ve done some stalls outside shops.

I strongly recommend that you do this and in the book there, my memoir–the story of my life [8], I have a whole chapter on this when we did it, and what happened for us. Make it time limited, then we say “Do we want to continue on?” and normally people do, because you get a tremendous sense of strength, of backing up each other.

I’m going to stop now. I want to say that this unity, this interconnectivity we talk about and that is represented in the Shambhala prophecy by the Pacha–the insight into the interdependence and inter-existence of all phenomena–that is not just a lovely spiritual thought or a pious wish. We are in such trouble now that this commitment to our interconnectedness in life has to come from our roots. It has to come from our base chakra, where we are connected with the earth and where our instinct for preservation of life is. The instinct has been dampened and broken in our society and we have to get back to it. Unblock that powerful side, and we’re going to do some practice in that with this closing litany.

It’s a life chant written by a poet Diane de Prima, and it will be the conclusion of my talk. I want to thank you so much for your attention, I really appreciate it. I’ve never tried to talk about climate change before, and I thought “how can I talk about something that seems so hopeless,” but then I thought so many things are hopeless already, and if we shed hope then the hopelessness goes too. We can be there, be present for this great adventure.

Your role is this, you’re going to say, “may it continue”. Life wants to continue, and it’s not just a question about whether we have all the facts or not, life wants to continue...say it...

Thank you.

Joanna Macy, Ph.D. is an Eco-philosopher, a scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory, and deep ecology. She is also a leading voice in movements for peace, justice, and a safe environment. Her wide-ranging work addresses psychological and spiritual issues of the nuclear age, the cultivation of ecological awareness, and the fruitful resonance between Buddhist thought and contemporary science.

www.joannamacy.net

Climate Outreach Information Network is a charitable trust specialising in public education on climate change and its impacts. COIN works with individuals, households, small community organisations and progressive businesses to directly engage the public about climate change, and supply the means by which they can reduce their own emissions.

References:

[1] For a gold mine of information about the Work That Reconnects in the UK and beyond, subscribe to Chris Johnstone's quarterly email newsletter, "The Great Turning Times." Write to him at chris {at} chrisjohnstone.info with SUBSCRIBE in the subject line.

[2] Sunday Times, 8th May 2005

[3] Coming Back to Life: Practices to reconnect our lives, our world. Joanna Macy and Molly Young Brown, New Society Publishers, 1998

[4] World Information Service on Energy

[5] Editor's note: Travelling by freighter ship is in fact possible, it's just not well known. For more info, and links to lots of other sites, see: http://www.geocities.com/freighterman.geo/

[6] For more poems, see: http://www.spondee.net/poets/SilvermarieSue.htm

[7] From Rilke’s Book of Hours, translated by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows (NY: Riverhead, 1997)

[8] Widening Circles: A Memoir, Joanna Macy, New Society Publishers, 2000

This paper was transcribed by Jo Hamilton and edited by George Marshall. It can be distributed and reproduced freely and without permission for non-profit purposes.