A framework from Joanna Macy
The shift from an industrial growth society to a life-sustaining society.
We are living through a period when one way of organizing human life is reaching its limits and another is trying to take root. Joanna Macy calls this transition the Great Turning. It asks us to protect what remains, build ways of living that sustain life, and change the stories and relationships that shape how we live.
The Great Turning and its three dimensions come from the work of Joanna Macy. The archetype mapping later on this page is our project’s interpretation and is not part of Macy’s framework or the assessment scoring.
Three dimensions
No single approach can carry the whole transition. The three dimensions describe distinct forms of participation that strengthen and correct one another.
01
Protect what remains.
Holding Actions slow harm and defend the foundations of life. This includes protecting land and water, defending communities, documenting harm, changing policy, organizing campaigns, and standing between what is sacred and what would destroy it.
This work buys time and keeps future possibilities alive.
Resistance can become an endless cycle of urgency, exhaustion, and opposition.
02
Create functional alternatives.
This dimension builds the institutions, economies, technologies, and community structures that can replace extractive systems. Examples include regenerative agriculture, mutual aid, restorative justice, cooperative ownership, local food systems, and new forms of governance.
It makes another way of living tangible and available.
New structures can reproduce the same values as the systems they were created to replace.
03
Change how we understand and relate.
This dimension transforms the stories, beliefs, and patterns beneath our systems. It includes healing, art, education, ceremony, embodied practice, cultural work, and the recovery of ways of knowing that restore our relationship with each other and the living world.
It changes what people can imagine, value, and choose.
Inner change can remain private while harmful systems continue untouched.
Why all three matter
Holding Actions preserve what the future needs. Life-Sustaining Systems give that future practical form. Shifting Consciousness changes the values and relationships that allow those systems to remain alive.
Many people feel pressure to be activist, builder, healer, teacher, and visionary at once. The framework gives us permission to find the form of participation that is ours while respecting the work held by others.
A protector needs viable alternatives to defend. A builder needs a story that keeps the work rooted in life. A healer needs communities and systems where repair can take hold. Each dimension depends on the others.
A project interpretation
These placements name each role's clearest mechanism. They are not meant to create three equal groups. Many roles move across two or all three dimensions in practice.
Sacred Steward may move into Holding Actions when a place is threatened. Synthesizer can guide structural alternatives by making systems visible. Healer can help create durable forms of community care.
Your assessment result ranks the 15 archetypes directly. The Great Turning dimensions provide a wider lens for reflection. They are not hidden categories in the scoring model.
Further reading
By Joanna Macy and Chris Johnstone. A practical exploration of how to face ecological and social crises without giving up our capacity to respond.
By Joanna Macy and Molly Brown. A guide to the practices and philosophy of the Work That Reconnects.
By Joanna Macy. Essays that explore interdependence, engaged spirituality, and our relationship with the living world.
Joanna Macy’s wider body of work offers practices for moving through gratitude, grief, new ways of seeing, and committed action.