The three stories of our time

Diving into the work of Joanna Macy

I’ve been following the work of Joanna Macy for some time now and it’s been really helpful in shaping my thinking around climate and systems change. She’s the author of at least a dozen books, a Buddhist teacher and practitioner, and has led workshops throughout her life helping others to work through their grief about the state of the world, turning it into action. Her books have been a great inspiration to me. 

I recently heard about a new podcast featuring Joanna, who is now 95, and Jessica Serrante, a younger collaborator who has worked alongside her for many years. It feels like a passing of the intergenerational baton; these two women holding space for open and vulnerable conversations about the future of our planet, one at the sunset of her time on this earth, and one poised to pick up right where she left off. 

Joanna Macy. Image: Lion’s Roar

The second episode, titled “The three stories of our time,” spoke to me in particular. I wanted to focus this piece on some of the ideas introduced there, because I believe that they have the ability to help us move through this particularly difficult time for our world. 

In the episode, the two discuss a foundational element of Joanna’s work: the three dominant stories that are circulating in our world today. The first story she calls Business as Usual. Familiar to all of us, this story chronicles the growth of our industrial economy, the idea that we can–and must–continue growing at all costs, that we don’t need to sacrifice much in terms of our affluent lifestyles, that technology will fix the problems ahead of us. The effects we’re seeing on the climate are temporary and will be overcome. It’s the dominant story of our institutions; economists, politicians, and much of the media. It’s hard to escape from, and it’s hard to imagine futures other than this one. 

The second story is what she calls The Great Unraveling. This is the story that has been told by climate scientists, journalists, and those blowing the whistle on Business As Usual. It tells the story of the collapse of our ecosystems, the devastation of our soils, the warming of our atmosphere and oceans. It warns of possible collapse of the earth’s ability to sustain life. “I like the term ‘unraveling,’” says Joanna, “because systems don’t just fall over dead, they fray, progressively losing their coherence, integrity, and memory.” That is what this story chronicles: the undeniable fraying of our world–of the story told by Business as Usual. We all know this story, but many of us don’t know how to contend with it as it can carry with it a lot of grief, hopelessness, and paralysis. 

The third story–and the focus of much of Joanna’s work–she calls The Great Turning. It’s the story that charts the way towards a life-sustaining society. She calls it “the great adventure of our time” (a framing I love). It is already well underway in certain pockets around the world, often at local and grassroots levels where people are finding new ways of living with one another and the earth. She believes this moment of transition to be on the same magnitude as the shift from hunter-gathering to an agricultural society–a “hinge moment” in history. 

It also involves a large-scale shift in our collective consciousness; from seeing the universe as something outside of us–and thinking of ourselves as atomized, separate individuals–towards viewing it as a whole and conscious system. It also involves the shift to viewing the world as something we are fundamentally a part of–something that lives within us as we live within it. It’s a story of reconnection, of changing course from the path we are currently on towards something different. 

What struck me as so insightful wasn’t only this characterization of the three stories (which is already insightful enough). It was something that Jessica said about how she shifted her thoughts about these three stories and how they might play out in reality. When we hear them laid out like this, our impression might be that we must reject the first two stories and move towards accepting the third. That it’s about one story “winning” over the other two, that we have choices about linear futures to inhabit and we must make the “right” choice. If we “choose” to accept and pursue Business as Usual or The Great Unraveling, then it means that it’s happening at the expense of The Great Turning. 

But the reality is that all three of these stories will unfold at the same time, on different scales. Our world is far too complicated for one tidy story to eclipse all others. In some ways, Business as Usual will continue into the future. We likely won’t see some kind of dramatic fall of our entire economic system and all of our current institutions, replaced with something dramatically different. The Great Unraveling will play out at other scales; there will be devastation of aspects of our environment. There will be loss of life, both human and non-human. We won’t get out of this unscathed, and we also likely will not see some kind of entirely life-ending apocalypse in the near future, either. Finally, The Great Turning will unfold at yet another scale. Human beings will come together, creatively contributing in their own ways to the creation of a life-sustaining society. All of the stories will exist together, interplaying with one another, co-arising based on what actions are taken in our present. I find this thought comforting.

The question is about how we will work within all of these stories. Most of us cannot escape the realities of Business as Usual entirely by moving to some far-away eco-commune cut-off from civilization. We must hold down jobs, save for retirement, pay taxes, and contend with our political system and its impacts. We also must contend with the grief and suffering uncovered by The Great Unraveling, accept rather than ignore the realities of the current world. And, if we desire the creation of a truly ecological and life-sustaining world, we must figure out how to dedicate our lives to bringing about The Great Turning. We have to exist in all of these stories at once, without getting lost in the first two. 

That’s the question that has interested me for years. If we yearn for a different kind of world, how can we actually bring it about? It’s easy to fling around lofty rhetoric, but we’re all just people, mostly living in cities, who are constrained by any number of challenging economic and social constraints. How can we do more than play our little part in the Business as Usual story, to give our lives to helping a new kind of world take root?

The answer is, of course, highly individual, based on our interests, location, culture, skills, and connections. But there are some common threads, also laid out by Joanna, that I want to share because they’ve helped me make sense of my own role.

There’s a kind of conventional wisdom that the “right” way to bring about societal change is to become an activist, go to protests, and engage in political action. The truth is that, although these actions are important, it is so much broader than that. There are threads that each of us can weave into our collective tapestry that contribute to forming a different kind of society. 

Joanna lays out four dimensions of The Great Turning: Holding Actions in Defense of Life, Transforming the Foundations of our Common Life, Shift in Perception and Values, and Nurturing Life. Let’s look at each in turn. 

1. Holding Actions in Defense of Life

The aim of these actions is to “hold back and slow down the damage being caused by the political economy of the Industrial Growth Society.” That means preserving what’s left of our biodiversity, our ecosystems, and the integrity of our social systems. This is the side of things that most often involves protest, whistleblowing, and organizing. It could be as large as national protest movements and court cases, and as local as getting organized to prevent a harmful pesticide from being sprayed in a local park. Remember that scale is not the only measure of impact; local actions can be incredibly impactful as well. 

We can’t stop at these actions, however. We can’t just slow down the harm. We also have to replace and transform the harmful systems that are causing the destruction of life in the first place. 

2. Transforming the Foundations of our Common Life

This type of action involves getting to the roots of the Industrial Growth Economy and developing “alternative structures, draw[ing] on wisdom retained and cultivated by people of ancient and traditional cultures.” These actions serve as experimenting grounds for different ways of living together. They include projects like permaculture and ecological farming, ecovillages, collective houses, intergenerational living, or other ways of disrupting the status quo of how we live together and with the planet. The shift towards a more expansive definition of family, or single parents banding together in a shared house to collectively raise their children are other examples of this. So are things like Community Land Trusts, and mutual aid efforts. Although these often happen on small scales, they are like the seeds that burst through the concrete to show that other ways of living are possible. However, they also aren’t enough to bring forth large-scale transformation on their own. 

3. Shift in Perception and Values

There must be a large-scale shift in our values and perceptions about the world if the other types of action are to be successful. Systems of thought like deep ecology, ecofeminism, liberation theory, and systems thinking are all tools to help us let go of some of our ideas about the world–like our separateness from one another and the planet–and replace them with a more connected understanding of our place in it. Writing about these ideas, learning about them, and speaking about them to one another are all important parts of the puzzle. They help us to resist despair, hopelessness, and blaming one another for our situation, instead finding the places where we can come together in our shared humanity.

4. Nurturing Life

This last dimension was added more recently, to capture the more everyday ways that we can nurture the life that surrounds us. Raising children to be connected and healthy people is one way that we nurture life; caring for elderly family members is another. Seed saving is another way to nurture life, as is restoring a small piece of land from degradation into fertility. All actions that support life on this earth, even everyday actions, are almost like the “glue” that holds all of the other pieces together. 

“If the world is to be healed through human efforts, I am convinced it will be by ordinary people, people whose love for this life is even greater than their fear.”

- Joanna Macy

What I love about all of this is the great diversity in possible actions. We don’t each have to engage in all four dimensions of action. We can find the ones that speak to us and lean into those. We can let go of the false image that we must be doing everything, all the time, to single-handedly change the world. We can imagine each of us with our one single thread, weaving our own unique pattern into the tapestry of this new world. It could be how we parent; how we show up in our neighbourhoods; the work we do throughout our career; or our volunteer efforts. There are so many ways to contribute, and they are as unique as each of us. Our work is to find out what speaks to us, and find a way to bring it forth into the world. 

In keeping with the newsletter’s theme, I’d like to recommend a few of Joanna’s books that I found especially illuminating. They are Active Hope, World as Lover, World as Self, and Coming Back to Life. All of them are full of wisdom and teachings to help us make sense of the moment that we’re in. And, of course, I recommend listening to the podcast We Are the Great Turning and checking out Joanna’s body of work, called The Work the Reconnects.

1. Program Manager (Research Lead) and Digital Campaign Specialist – Shift: Action for Pension Wealth & Planet Health (a project of Makeway). Full-time contract, remote, $70,000-$85,000

2. Special Projects Manager – The Starfish Environmental Society. Remote (Metro Vancouver), $26.25/hour, 30 hours per week

3. Arts/Event Coordinator – The Wilder. Squamish or surroundings, $22 - $28/hour, 10-30 hours per week

4. Program Lead, Salmon-Safe BC. Hybrid, Metro Vancouver, $70-74K annually

5. Managing Director, Wild Bird Trust of BC (WBT). Vancouver, $68,000 annually.