Joanna Macy’s “The End of Oil, Climate Change, and the Great Turning” was adapted from a talk given for the Post Carbon Institute in June 2005, and published in the Fall 2005 issue of Inquiring Mind.
Macy opens with two Buddhist hand gestures — the abhaya mudra (Fear Not) and bhumisparsa mudra (Earth-touching) — as postures for facing the crisis without flinching from it, alongside Haudenosaunee treaty protocols of respect, clarity, and forgiveness. She invites the reader to imagine how future generations might describe this era: a civilisation utterly dependent on fossil fuels, repeatedly warned of depletion and climate disruption, yet unable to picture any alternative to its own growth.
Her central move is to name two possible responses to that predicament — contraction through denial and fear, or expansion through openness and creativity — and to frame the second as the Great Turning: “the epochal shift from the industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society.” She identifies three dimensions moving at once within it: holding actions that slow the damage, the building of alternative structures, and a deeper shift in worldview toward recognising our interdependence — a shift she likens to the Buddha’s own awakening to universal interdependence.
Rather than offering false comfort, the piece argues that facing peak oil and climate change squarely, without denial, is itself what allows wholehearted engagement — grounded in a form of belonging that, unlike oil, “will never run out.”
This is one of Macy’s own essays, not John Seed’s material — read the full text at Inquiring Mind. For her broader body of work and the methodology this essay grows out of, see workthatreconnects.org and joannamacy.net.