Joanna Macy, at 96; eco-anxiety pioneer

Joanna macy, a pioneer in facing the emotional stress caused by climate change, who wrote books and led workshops on what became known as ecodespair or eco-anxiety, died 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 said 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. today, the climate psychology Alliance offers a directory of hundreds of climateaware therapists.

But in the 1970s, when ms. macy told a psychotherapist of her sadness over the destruction of a nearby forest, she was informed that the problem was her fear of her own libido.

in 1977, she attended a symposium in Boston, held by the cousteau Society, on threats to the environment. Heading home on the train, she crossed the charles River, where sailboats sparkled in the sunset, and she burst into tears.

“Between the beauty of this world and the knowledge of what we are doing to it came a luminous and almost unbearable grief,” she wrote in “World as Lover, World as Self,” originally published in 1991.

Soon after that experience, she began leading workshops in what she called “despair work,” allowing participants to explore their anxiety about the fate of the earth and, if possible, to find ways to positively channel their emotions.

thousands attended the workshops ms. macy led in the 1980s in the United States, europe, Japan, and Australia, gathering in churches, schools, and retreat centers. those workshops were designed to help people from being overwhelmed by dread, to break through a psychic numbing, and to find the motivation to act — by joining a protest movement, say, or changing their own habits.

With the end of the cold War and a waning of the threat of nuclear war, ms. macy’s focus increasingly turned to the climate crisis. in a 2021 revision of “World as Lover, World as Self,” she noted that the world’s industrial nations had collectively failed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by “the slightest fraction of a degree,” and that a feeling of despair was more understandable than ever.

“it represents a genuine accession to the possibility that this planetary experiment will end, the curtain rung down, the show over,” she wrote.

She and other workshop leaders refined their approach, calling it “the work that reconnects.” A workshop, which might last one or two days, included four stages, which ms. macy called a spiral: acknowledging gratitude for the world; expressing pain for the world; “seeing with fresh eyes”; and “going forth” to make a difference.

mary Joanne Rogers was born may 2, 1929, in Los Angeles and grew up in new York city, one of three children of Hartley Rogers, and margaret (kinsey) Rogers.

ms. macy leaves her children, christopher, Jack, and peggy macy, and three grandchildren.