Marc Ian Barasch

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Marc Ian Barasch (1949- ) is a non-fiction author, a film and television writer-producer, and activist for environmental causes. Major books written by Barasch are The Healing Path (1992), Remarkable Recovery (1995), Healing Dreams (2001) and Field Notes on the Compassionate Life (2005). He is executive director of the Green World Campaign.

As editor-in-chief of New Age Journal in the early 1980s, he was a spokesman for what demographer Paul Ray labelled "the cultural creatives." Barasch's cogent, critical, and not infrequently witty perspective influenced a movement which, ignored by mainstream media at the time, has become a driving force in American society. Barasch, a practicing Buddhist, spoke of an "emergent civilization" whose spiritual and environmental values would inform social, economic, and political practice. He radically revamped what had been an obscure, small-circulation magazine serving a parochial audience into a national publication that won a National Magazine Award and attracted a wide readership. At the same time, Barasch wrote skeptically of what he called "new-age Calvinism" and of what he viewed as the woolly-mindedness of some of his cohorts. Barasch went on to edit other national publications--notably Psychology Today and Natural Health--producing a perceivable tilt in editorial policy toward the interests and concerns of the cultural creatives.

The Jungian analyst Claire Douglas, reviewing Barasch's book Healing Dreams [1] in the Washington Post, cites "a poetic intensity" and "trail-blazing contributions to dream research." Barasch's bestselling study of spontaneous remission, Remarkable Recovery (with researcher Caryle Hirshberg) was the subject of a Newsweek article and garnered wide attention in the medical world. (E.g., oncologist Dr. Moshe Frenkel of M.D. Anderson Hospital has acknowledged the book as an impetus for a nascent multi-institutional study of spontaneous remission.) Barasch's Field Notes on the Compassionate Life [2] a work of literary nonfiction on empathy, altruism, and conflict resolution, attracted the support of figures like South African Nobel Prize winner Archbishop Desmond Tutu.

In broadcast media, Barasch's script for a 1992 global television special "One Child, One Voice" addressed world environmental issues with a blunt urgency. When advertisers shunned it, maverick broadcaster Ted Turner distributed the show minus commercials to 160-odd countries, appending his own on-camera appeal, and a 2002 re-edited broadcast was nominated for an Emmy Award. Barasch has executive produced TV specials for the Discovery Channel and England's Channel Four, and developed film projects at Columbia Pictures. Barasch is credited as initial producer of the National Public Radio Show "E-Town" (sometimes called the "environmental Prairie Home Companion").

In 2006, Barasch founded the Green World Campaign [3], a nonprofit whose stated mission is linking "holistic" development models like agroforestry with the broader environmental movement [4]. With its slogan "It's amazing what one seed can grow," the organization proposed a massive global afforestation effort of billions of trees, connecting donors to grassroots NGOs via media-driven, Web-based campaigns. Barasch, who in an interview called his strategy "green compassion," has focused the group's work on ecological restoration at a village level, planting multi-purpose trees (MPTs) to address a synergistic grab-bag of issues: restoration of indigenous ecology, poverty, sustainable rural economy, soil remediation, cultural preservation, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration. The first pilot program was in Ethiopia's Gurage Zone, and work has expanded to Mexico and India.

Barasch was educated at Yale University, where he studied literature, psychology, anthropology, and film. He was a founding member of the psychology department at Naropa University in Boulder, Colorado, the first accredited Buddhist-established university in the U.S. A trained musician, he has played and recorded with the Rock Bottom Remainders, a "lit-rock" band consisting of authors Amy Tan, Stephen King, Maya Angelou, and others. He has collaborated with Grammy and Academy Award-winner Alan Menken, composer of "Beauty and the Beast" et. al.

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