• Dharma And Development: Religion As Resource In The Sarvodaya Self-Help Movement
• Mutual Causality in Buddhism and General Systems Theory
• Despair and Personal Power in the Nuclear Age
• World As Lover, World As Self
• Widening Circles, A Memoir
• Thinking Like a Mountain: Towards A Council Of All Beings (with John Seed, Pat Fleming, and Arne Naess)
• Coming Back to Life: Practices to Reconnect Our Lives, Our World

Activist in peace, justice and environment; eco-philosopher; scholar of Buddhism, general systems theory and deep ecology.

Read Joanna Macy for application of Buddhist teachings in activism, engaged Buddhism, living systems, deep ecology and nuclear guardianship. 

• Born in southern California, United States, in 1929. Educated at Lycee Francais de New York and was active in Christian youth programs. Subsequently she attended Wellesley College majoring in Biblical History. There was a crisis of faith and after graduation she left for France. She returned to United States and work with the CIA for two and a half years. Left with family for Germany (1956) for a few years and then came back to Washington for four years. Was living in Asia and Africa (1964-1969) and it was during this tumultuous period that she was introduced to Buddhism.

• Encountered Buddhism, the Tibetan Kagyu Tradition, in 1965 while working for the Peace Corps Program with Tibetan refugees in northern India, and it became central to her life and work. When she returned to America (1972) and while in graduate school she harvested teachings from Buddhist scriptures and her doctoral work at Syracuse University focused on the Buddha’s doctrine of dependent co-arising and its convergences with general systems theory. After completing her dissertation she spends a year in extensive fieldwork in Buddhist Sri Lanka mainly with Sarvodaya, a village self-help movement. This experience instructed her about the relevance of Buddhist teachings to social change. She was also engaged in Vipassana, a Buddhist meditation method of the Theravadin tradition. Beginning in the late 1970s she was deeply engaged in anti-nuclear and environmental course.

• 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. Over the past twenty years many thousands of people around the world have participated in Joanna's workshops and trainings, while her methods have been adopted and adapted yet more widely in classrooms, churches, and grassroots organizing. Her work helps people transform despair and apathy, in the face of overwhelming social and ecological crises, into constructive, collaborative action. It brings a new way of seeing the world, as our larger living body, freeing us from the assumptions and attitudes that now threaten the continuity of life on Earth.

• She travels widely giving lectures, workshops, and trainings in North America, Europe, Asia, and Australia. She is a member of the Advisory Council of the Buddhist Peace Fellowship. She serves as adjunct professor to three graduate schools in the San Francisco Bay Area: the Starr King School for the Ministry, the University of Creation Spirituality, and the California Institute of Integral Studies.

• She lives in Berkeley, California, with her husband Francis Macy, near her children and grandchildren.