Online Zoom Forum: Joanna Macy: The Spiritual, Ecological, and Social Vision in her Life and Work.
Date: Wednesday 26 March 2025.
Time: 7pm-9pm (UK time).
Description:
Format: There will be five talks, each of 12 minutes, followed by 20 minutes of discussion among the speakers, followed by Q & A.
Chair:
Dr Nadine Andrews:
Bio: Dr Nadine Andrews is a mindfulness, nature-connection and Qi Gong teacher, and regularly gives talks and workshops on climate psychology.
She works part-time in the Scottish Government providing social research and systems thinking expertise in relation to transformational change. https://lifefriendly.earth/
Speakers:
Dr Stephanie Kaza:
Title: Joanna Macy: Inspirational Guide, Brilliant Teacher.
Description: A consideration of the key teaching themes and styles that emerged for Joanna Macy over the long history of her calling as a teacher and guide to eco-activists around the globe.
Bio: Dr Stephanie Kaza is a long-time practitioner of Soto Zen Buddhism, affiliated with Upaya Zen Center, New Mexico, and author of Green Buddhism: Practice and Compassionate Action in Uncertain Times; Hooked! Buddhist Writings on Greed, Desire, and the Urge to Consume; and Conversations with Trees: An Intimate Ecology. She envisioned and coordinated the tribute volume: A Wild Love for the World: Joanna Macy and the Work of Our Time and worked with Macy to complete the third edition of Macy’s collected essays, World as Lover, World as Self. She is Professor Emerita of Environmental Studies, University of Vermont, where she taught courses on religion and ecology and unlearning consumerism. Dr Kaza writes and lectures widely on topics of Buddhism and ecology and currently works on climate issues in Portland, Oregon.
Prof Loretta Pyles:
Title: Let Everything Happen to You: Gaia Poetics in Joanna Macy’s Life and Work.
Description: Joanna Macy’s life and work are marked by an attunement to the heartbeat of the earth and an ability to translate earth’s voices for all who care to listen. Poetry has been a conduit and spiritual guide throughout her life as an ecological, spiritual, and social justice activist. In Rilke’s poem (co-translated by Macy) – Let Everything Happen to You – he writes: “Just keep going, no feeling is final.” This now famous line points to an earth wisdom of resilience that activists and communities can and must tap into in support of healing justice commitments. The deep time of earth reminds us of something ancient, interconnected, and irrepressible needed for sustained activism. In this talk, I will trace these “Gaia poetics” across several areas and themes of Macy’s corpus.
Bio: Loretta Pyles, Ph.D., is Professor in the School of Social Welfare at the State University of New York at Albany in the USA. Her research and community work have focused on environmental disasters, community organising, gender-based violence, poverty, racism, and body-mind-spirit practice. Her books include Progressive Community Organizing: Transformative Practice in a Globalizing World (Routledge, 3rd edition, 2021), Healing Justice: Holistic Self-Care for Change Makers (Oxford University Press, 2018) and (with Juliana Svistova), Production of Disaster and Recovery in Haiti: Disaster Industrial Complex (Routledge, 2018). She is also a mindful outdoor guide and yoga teacher.
Dr Susanne C. Moser:
Title: Narratives to Frame This Moment of Time.
Description: The articulation of three great narratives that can describe our time - Business-as-Usual, The Great Unraveling, and The Great Turning - is one of Joanna Macy's great gifts to the world. I draw on them frequently these days in my work supporting my colleagues on the climate change and climate justice frontlines as they nearly drown in the challenging conditions now unfolding in the U.S. In this brief talk, I will recall these narratives, articulate how they are helpful, and try to delineate the skills they point to needed to assist in The Great Turning. I will illustrate with some examples of how these skills are essential to the work of climate adaptation and transformation in the face of climate change.
Bio: Susanne C. Moser (she/her) is an independent scholar and consultant who works in the US and internationally from a base in western Massachusetts, the unceded ancestral homeland of the Nipmuc and Pocumtuc. A geographer by training (Ph.D. 1997, Clark University), her work over the past 30+ years has focused on adaptation to climate change, climate change communication, science-policy interactions, and psycho-social resilience in the face of the traumatic and transformative challenges associated with climate change. She has served on scientific advisory boards for Future Earth, the International Science Council, the US National Research Council and contributed to IPCC, US national and state climate assessments. Susi has been trained by Joanna Macy in the Work That Reconnects, and has published several poems in the Deep Times Journal edited by her collaborator and friend, Molly Young Brown. You can learn more about Susi at https://www.susannemoser.com.
Prof Paul Hoggett:
Title: How to Praise in a Time of Horror?
Description: In her introduction to In Praise of Mortality Joanna Macy poses the above question which is the title of this presentation. Twenty years on, with a malignant installed in the White House, her question is even more pressing. Perhaps some insight is provided by Etty Hillesum, a young, sexually and spiritually adventurous Dutch woman who kept a diary of her experiences at the Westerbork Transit Camp before she was transported to Auschwitz. It is an extraordinary paean to life during a time of horror.
Bio: Paul Hoggett has just retired as a psychoanalytic psychotherapist and is Emeritus Professor of Social Policy at UWE, Bristol. With Adrian Tait he founded the Climate Psychology Alliance in 2012. His most recent book is Paradise Lost? The Climate Crisis and the Human Condition (Simplicity Institute, 2023)
Robert Bosnak:
Title: Identifying with the Power of Destruction to Gain Agency at Times of Annihilation.
Description: Joanna Macy was part of the 1983 conference I had organized called Facing Apoclaypse. Joanna used the psychology of despair to turn people towards action.
I will present dreamwork with survivors of the 2011 tsunami in Japan to demonstrate that the power to act is hidden in the most terrifying image.
Bio: Robert Bosnak, NCPsyA is a Jungian psychoanalyst with 54 years of experience in psychotherapy. He graduated from the C.G. Jung Institute in Zurich in 1977, was president of the International Association for the Study of Dreams, is author of 9 books of fiction and non-fiction, is on the psychiatry faculty of the SUNY Upstate Medical University in Syracuse NY, and is co-founder and president of Attune Media Labs, PBC, creator of patented emotionally intelligent empathic generative AI companions used in healthcare at www.attunemedialabs.com. The method he developed, Embodied Imagination, is taught and practiced worldwide.
An archive recording will be made for the EICSP archive.
NB: There will be no refund if you cancel your booking.
Cost: By Donation:
Contact: Neill Walker, This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it.
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