> Joanna Macy : Pour reverdir l’être, In: Revue 3e millénaire, n°117, Automne 2015 (pp. 29-37)

LibraryThing Review:

This is a collection of essays that do a good job of spanning Macy's main work. Most of these essays are reprinted, sometimes with modification, from other sources, including other books of Macy as well as other essay collection, journals, etc. There are a few essays here original to this book. A few others come from reasonably obscure places. So even if you have a pretty good Green Buddhism collection, you probably won't have too much duplication.

I can see Macy's work, as presented here, spread nicely across the three trainings of Buddhism: wisdom, ethics, and meditation. The conceptual foundation of her work is interdependent origination, which she connects to systems theory. There is a section of five essays here that summarize her thinking in this area, which was more extensively presented in her superlative Mutual Causality book.

Macy's work with the Sarvodaya group in Sri Lanka is an excellent example of ethical action. I've always wondered how this group's work intersects with the long civil war between Buddhists and Tamil Hindus. Macy touches on this topic which at least gave me a starting perspective. I wonder if the Transition Town movement has interacted much with the Sarvodaya folks.

Macy presents here a short but representative selection of Deep Ecology meditation practices. I think the biggest difference between these and traditional Buddhist practices such as tonglen is that the Deep Ecology practices stretch more into the deep past and future.

This is a collection of essays that do a good job of spanning Macy's main work. Most of these essays are reprinted, sometimes with modification, from other sources, including other books of Macy as well as other essay collection, journals, etc. There are a few essays here original to this book. A few others come from reasonably obscure places. So even if you have a pretty good Green Buddhism collection, you probably won't have too much duplication.

I can see Macy's work, as presented here, spread nicely across the three trainings of Buddhism: wisdom, ethics, and meditation. The conceptual foundation of her work is interdependent origination, which she connects to systems theory. There is a section of five essays here that summarize her thinking in this area, which was more extensively presented in her superlative Mutual Causality book.

Macy's work with the Sarvodaya group in Sri Lanka is an excellent example of ethical action. I've always wondered how this group's work intersects with the long civil war between Buddhists and Tamil Hindus. Macy touches on this topic which at least gave me a starting perspective. I wonder if the Transition Town movement has interacted much with the Sarvodaya folks.

Macy presents here a short but representative selection of Deep Ecology meditation practices. I think the biggest difference between these and traditional Buddhist practices such as tonglen is that the Deep Ecology practices stretch more into the deep past and future. ( )