Psychedelics Against the Climate Crisis
Humanity’s fight against the climate crisis has historically known no bounds — bold and innovative concepts, from carbon capture to meat replacements and plastic-eating mushrooms, have been introduced. Yet, climate action at the expected scale is missing. Could an unlikely contestant change that?
What happened?
Social movements have formed part of societal evolution for thousands of years — both ancient Greece and Rome saw themselves confronted with “peasant uprisings” that would later determine the path of humanity. Both objectives and participants of social movements have taken many shapes and forms throughout the centuries, but what does it take for an individual grudge to become a popular front? Whilst there is a plethora of aspects that could possibly set off such a movement, a two-week, Costa-Rica-bound spiritual journey involving iboga, kambo and ayahuasca is a clear outlier. But what then 19-year-old climate activist Gail Bradbrook described as a healing process in which she faced aspects of herself that felt “superior, judgemental, competitive, and separating” eventually led to an encounter with fellow climate activist Roger Hallam, with whom she founded the nonviolent civil disobedience group Extinction Rebellion, one of the most prominent social movements in this young century.
Gailbrook’s experience coincides with a general reignition of interest in the effects of psychedelic drugs — for purely medical purposes, such as the therapy of treatment-resistant depression, but also for a strangely remarkable field of study: as enablers to overcome inaction in the face of the climate crisis.
A seemingly farfetched idea leads us into the metaphysical realm, where quantifiability and subjective experiences interact in a promising scientific waltz — ayahuasca against the climate crisis?
Give me the lowdown
Just like social movements, the use of psychedelics predates the modern world. Psychoactive plants were first recorded to be used some 13,000 years ago, whilst the advocates of the “stoned ape theory” go as far as attributing intersections in human intellectual evolution some 200,000 years ago to psychedelics. In contrast to other drugs — which offer an equally rich, but famously less pleasant history -, the common denominator of psychedelic drugs is said to be a pronounced and profound alteration of consciousness upon use, involving self-reflection, senses of oneness and a deepened connection to nature and the universe.
Whilst such description stands in stark contrast to healing-related, cultural meaning for Indigenous people across South America and Southeast Asia — the very first practitioners of ancient medicines using psychedelics –, scientific communities have largely agreed that psychedelics do in fact affect our “neuroplasticity” and interact with our brain’s serotonin 5-HT2A receptors — neurotransmitters which have shown to affect our mood, cognition and perception -, manifesting itself via two distinct routes.
One such route sees psychedelics as “action-enablers”, as captured in a 2022 study from the Queen Mary University of London, in which, amongst test subjects with prior experience with psychedelics, subjects with true “mystical experiences” (i.e., the abovementioned pronounced and profound alteration of consciousness) demonstrated more pro-environmental behaviour (including vegetarian diets, buying eco-friendly products etc.) than those who haven’t had such mystical experiences — confirming the findings of a previous 2017 studywithin the same field. Amongst others, a feeling of self-embeddedness in nature during the experience was reported, leading to stronger engagement in everyday pro-environmental behaviors (recycling etc.). Such “nature-connectedness” is now considered a quantifiable discipline of research within the mental health subject and possibly forms the underlying driver behind the desire to care for nature and similar pro-environmentalist behavior.
Whilst the self-reported nature of the behaviors limits the study to deducing correlation, instead of causation, between psychedelics and pro-environmental attitudes, it hints at the crucial pattern of “ego-dissolution” that could magnify nature-connectedness — a state in which one’s sense of self dissolved, inviting connection with something or someone else. If a person is, supposedly, introduced to climate action in the midst of a psychedelic “mystical experience”, a persuasion towards climate action could be induced. Likewise, a “deepened” connection to nature for individuals whose psychedelic experience took place in natural settings has been recorded.
Another route sees the reactionary, mitigatory effect of psychedelics as a possible manifestation. In Michael Pollan’s How to Change Your Mind, for instance, a study on cancer patients showed significantly alleviating effects when using psychedelics to deal with depression and anxiety around one’s mortality. The parallels between a depressive, grief-like state and the recent scientifically documented “climate grief” — that of experienced or anticipated ecological losses on a mentally non-processable scale due to acute or chronic environmental change — seem evident and beg the question whether the benefits of the use of psychedelic drugs could extend from cancer patients to individuals experiencing such grief, and possibly to environmentalist action down the line.
Psychedelics should therefore not be seen (and hopefully won’t become) “opiates for the masses”, but rather as intellectual stimulants to re-evaluate one’s consciousness and connectedness, allowing visits to individual sites of trauma, pain or grief which can then be engaged with and overcome.
What’s the big picture?
The potential and uses of psychedelics have not remained without scepticism. Not only does the scope of movements that were inspired by the use of psychedelics extend to less “socially compatible” causes — right-wing ideologies have famously found use for the medicine -, but it is also worth noting that a positive experience with psychedelics is all but guaranteed. Psychedelic experiences can be extremely traumatic if not destabilising and, whilst having such an experience in a natural setting could lead to pro-environmental behavior, any other setting could result in vastly different outcomes and have serious consequences for the individual and the people around them (including acting as a driver in the 2021 US capitol riots for infamous “QAnon Shaman” Jacob Chansley). In anticipation of the further global movement towards the political extremes, this is a side of the “psychedelics coin” well-worth keeping in mind — especially in times where widespread decriminalisation of certain drugs forms part of national political discussions.
But political and social ideologies represent but one group of stakeholders to the effects and, more importantly, the consequences of psychedelics. From a conservation perspective, for instance, Indigenous populations that have relied on psychedelic plants for their medicines for centuries (if not millennia) now see themselves confronted with deforestation because of the rapid commercialisation of such plants. And whilst one might assume that such commercialisation is inherent with wider access to the benefits of psychedelics, two doses of psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression still set you back roughly $16k.
Ultimately, both advantages and disadvantages of the use of psychedelics boil down to the fact that psychedelics are not a silver bullet against climate change — nor any other major challenge that humanity faces. Whilst they have the potential to act as a positive contributor or as a “lubricant” for change, the question remains whether we have indeed reached the point at which we need to “brainwash” people into acting for the collective good. Are we that desperate already?
Whilst the widespread lack of decriminalisation will most certainly prevent such “brainwashing” from happening on a large scale, the big picture and the conclusion behind the renaissance of interest in psychedelics offer a welcome dialogue on an oftentimes critical cultural stance on drugs and their prohibition. If such dialogue reorientates its focus away from the individual and towards structural change — such as needed to overcome the climate crisis -, then the true potential of such substances and their meaning can be harnessed. If such dialogue so happens to be led by the Indigenous people that made use of psychedelics for longer than we could possibly think of, then this dialogue will not only be guided by the people most suited to do so, but also by the caretakers on whose lands 80% of the world’s biodiversity remains. The question on psychedelics is therefore not a matter of “if”, but a matter of “how”.
