Marc Ian Barasch

Who is Marc Ian Barasch?

Marc Ian Barasch is a non-fiction author, film and television writer-producer, magazine editor, and environmental activist. Major books written by Barasch are The Healing Path, Remarkable Recovery, Healing Dreams and Field Notes on the Compassionate Life. He has been an editor-in-chief of New Age Journal; and an editor at Psychology Today; and Natural Health. He has also done journalistic writing for Conde Nast publications on the arts and the environment. He is Founder and 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 where he produced a noticeable tilt toward the interests and concerns of the "cultural creatives".