Jaidan Brass - Joanna Macy (12/04)

     For my research paper topic, I chose Joanna Macy. She's a deep ecology author who combines the principles of deep ecology with the beliefs of Buddhism. One of these works is called World as Lover, World as Self. Macy states in this book that paticca samuppada is the phrase for interconnectedness of the world. She states that Buddha realized that every being in the world was interdependent on each other. This is hard for us to understand sometimes because of human nature. One individual might not realize the significance that soil has on our lives, and that the soils is made up of all kinds of life we would not realize if we did not open ourselves up to it first. Like how the one Ecology of Eden chapter on soil was. Buddhism also disagrees with the idea of priori reasoning, where knowledge is separated from experiences, because it also separates the idea from both us and the world. Macy finds that by opening ourselves up to the world, we can awaken the ability to find solutions to our environmental issues.

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