“Grace Happens When We Act with Others on Behalf of our World”: A Tribute to Joanna Macy

by Carolyn Raffensperger, SEHN executive director

There is a special category of friendship that shapes the history of the environmental movement: that of intergenerational mentorship. I’ve done my share of helping younger people identify their unique skills and the problem in the world they want to address with those skills. I treat those relationships with reverence because they can actually change the world. My husband, Fred Kirschenmann, discovered the enormous difference organic farming made in the quality of the soil from a graduate student of his, David Vetter. Fred, who recently passed away, was called the father of organic agriculture because of how he took the knowledge he got from David and applied it to his own 3,500 acre farm and then translated it into policy. 

My work on the precautionary principle was initiated when a graduate student, Joel Tickner, asked me to do a collaborative dissertation on the principle, something I had not heard of before Joel’s introduction. Joel and I went on to hold the Wingspread Conference on the Precautionary Principle in 1998. That conference had a global impact, with ripples still flowing from it.

But it is Joanna Macy, Buddhist scholar, ecosystems thinker, writer, and friend to thousands, including me, who taught me the most about intergenerational mentorship. Joanna passed away July 19, 2025. I want to mark this passage by describing her extraordinary contribution to the work that we do at SEHN.

I first encountered Joanna’s writing when I was appointed to an Illinois commission on siting a radioactive waste facility. Joanna was exceptionally astute about deep time and the long-lasting effects of things like radioactive waste, a problem she had been working on for years before I served on the commission. She showed us that, because of how long radioactive materials were hazardous, we had a unique obligation to warn future beings of the danger. Dealing with contaminants that would be hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years was relatively new in the history of the world. In 1989, she proposed the Guardianship Project.

Joanna’s proposal was in the back of my mind as I went on to serve on two National Academy of Sciences committees, one looking at cleaning up the gaseous diffusion plants, the gigantic facilities that enriched uranium for both bombs and nuclear power. The other committee sought ways to deal with radioactive and contaminated metals. Could they be recycled into frying pans and bridge supports? By the way, I voted no. It didn’t seem to be a good idea to just put these metals into the market, for a thousand public health reasons. My vote prevailed although the staff at the NAS was annoyed because their risk calculus was different than mine.

Fast forward to building out the conceptual infrastructure of the precautionary principle. We discovered that the principle was future-oriented because it was designed to prevent harm in the future rather than clean up messes that happened in the past. My friend, Tom Goldtooth, executive director of the Indigenous Environmental Network (IEN), told us that this was essentially the same as the Indigenous Seven Generation’s rule: make decisions with the seventh generation in mind.

In 2007-2008 IEN and SEHN partnered with the Harvard Law School’s Center for International Human Rights to develop the law of future generations. One of our proposals was to appoint legal guardians for future generations, similar to guardians ad litem who are designated to serve as guardians for children when they can’t speak for themselves and have no other responsible adult to advocate for them.

I remembered Joanna’s work on guardianship and wrote her a letter. I was astonished to receive an answer that demonstrated Joanna’s amazing spirit: she was entranced by the work we were doing on the precautionary principle and guardians of future generations. She told me that she would come anywhere I was, at any time, to meet with me. Wait! She was willing to come to snowy, cold Iowa in February? Yes. She was. I demurred and suggested I go to Berkeley instead. Our first meeting was remarkable as we talked ideas and did some of her rituals together. She shared a slide show of guardian images from around the world. That began a wonderful friendship.

Soon after, I was invited to design the principles of perpetual care for the long-term problem of the Giant Mine in Yellow Knife, the Northwest Territories. This old gold mine had contaminated an enormous area with the toxic chemical, arsenic trioxide. As I studied the problem, I realized that we were far outside the realm of 7 generations, and more likely in the time frame of 10,000 generations.

I went out to see Joanna and asked for help. I confessed that I could easily think in terms of 500 years because of that radioactive waste facility commission I had served on decades before. But 250,000 years? I had a hard time. Joanna told me to get working on it, that I needed to expand my thinking.

Two things made Joanna the consummate mentor and friend: First, she was eager and curious to hear these new ideas of the precautionary principle and the law of future generations. She made every effort to learn about and support our work on them. Second, she insisted that I rise to the challenge that had been given to me. She walked with me on the hard journey.

I am forever in Joanna’s debt. I end with two quotes of Joanna’s that give voice to how she lived in the world. 

“Be generous with your strengths and skills. They are not your private property, and they grow from being shared.”

“Grace happens when we act with others on behalf of our world.”

Joanna was exceptionally generous with her strengths and skills. She manifested grace with every word and action. 

Thank you dear Joanna.