Since our Psychedelics for Climate Action event in April, many of us have engaged in dialog on WhatsApp. Our group has continued to be filled with incredible people at the intersection of psychedelics and climate, from authors and economists to folks in leadership, healthcare, media, and the arts.
Catalyzed by the chat conversations, we gathered on Monday evening, Oct. 30, at 3 World Trade Center—big thanks to Vexta, a multidisciplinary street artist making cosmic creations, for hosting us, and to others who contributed to making this event possible, Felissa Rubin and Olya Titova.
The evening started with an introduction facilitation, with each person answering prompts that were co-created by participants: What brought you here tonight? What do you believe? How are you taking action? What are conversations and/or actions you would like to see? What do we mean by “consciousness”? How do you view the current climate crisis? What is the capacity of psychedelics for changing world views? What other tools can catalyze this shift?
Next, participants had the option of joining breakouts or engaging in their own side conversations. Breakouts included “What Are Psychedelic-informed Responses to Approaching Systemic Collapse?” with Daniel Pinchbeck and “Souls Wide Awake: Multiversal Realities of Climate Change and Psychedelics,” with Janine Dennis.
Read on for questions, new ideas, and takeaways (boldfaced throughout this post). Already, a connection was made through our group to host an eco-psychedelic facilitation at the Microdose Wonderland Conference this week—thank you, Sarah Fernandez. We will be creating an opt-in directory for our community as well. Stay tuned for follow-up events and opportunities to engage in next steps!
Janine Dennis: “We spoke about agency—how we might restore it as individuals, but also as a collective. We discussed how we may need to re-parent ourselves and unlearn mindsets, behaviors, and ideologies in some way to mitigate the conditioning that we've received, whether that's through a cultural, familial, educational, societal, or political lens.”
“We came to a consensus that we're responsible for everything we're seeing that's happening in the climate on Earth. We found it difficult to figure out how to unravel that conundrum when you realize that you're part of the problem because, oftentimes, it's easiest pointing the finger at one another and placing blame everywhere else rather than holding ourselves accountable. It's easy to say, ‘That person is responsible,’ ‘That person did it,’ or ‘It's not me.’ But really, it's all of us in as much as we're all here having these really insightful conversations in hopes that we might be part of the solution.”
“We talked about this concept of ‘The Avengers’—this idea that maybe it's a few of us that need to go ahead first and be brave, and it's not so much about trying to galvanize the whole but a few people, and then maybe they can catalyze others as well, from there the hope is that it catches on incrementally in this way. We need souls and hearts wide awake and people who are able to anchor the multitude of realities and solutions inherent in the climate change conversation. Psychedelics aren't the only medium to getting there, but we all agreed that psychedelics are certainly powerful teachers and connectors between us and nature.”
“Earth never needed us, and she's happily purged herself many times before. That's something that we should all keep in mind as we decide how we wish to contribute to the solution. Our group also agreed that there are sacrifices we all will have to make if we are to sustainably and substantially shift the current trajectory of climate change. We have a general sense of where we need to scale back or give up modern-day conveniences, but the question is: how do we start to detach ourselves from those things? In closing, we want to be on a quest to discover the good in one another and also the things that maybe we forgot about our connection to Earth.”
Daniel Pinchbeck: “We talked about stories and myths and how maybe certain myths of capitalism are coming to an end, like the myth of technological progress and material progress, being able to go on forever and technological progress being always positive.”
“Would it be possible to create a mycelial decentralized community-based network where people came together like this on a regular basis and looked at a curriculum around the best workaround surrender, and detachment? There used to be community groups like that, and now it's all virtual. Everyone is detached with social media bubbles. A movement forward would be a positive transition away from destructive modernity or postmodernity towards something that, in some ways, would look very different: more heart-focused, community-focused, and less material-focused.”
Nathalia: “We first asked and emphasized, ‘what is consciousness?’ A lot of people had a lot of beautiful things to say, like the primordial essence of isness; the true self before we become the conditioned self, or get into labeling and identification. We discussed how labeling and identification in society have increasingly been used to empower certain groups of people. Yet, it can also limit us and be reductive, and we want to get beyond the point of separating ourselves.”
“Also, what would we use as a selling point for this mycelial movement if there were to be one, or when there is one, and what would we be asking of people? Perhaps, a start is identifying what people want - joy and happiness - and that they think they can attain it through egoic desires like wealth, achievement, relationships, success, and the things that we are so motivated and conditioned to pursue in a city like this. We know, in truth, that the gratification we receive from these things are fleeting and reinforce polarizing patterns of attachment. Sustained happiness has to come from within us and our decision to be so. How can we show them that we can have that love and joy without the pain, attachment, clinging, and egoic greed that comes from fear and desire? A movement can facilitate the beginnings of this level of awareness.
Daniel Pinchbeck: “Making psychedelics available to people who are not so wealthy; democratizing access to them. Marissa had the idea of creating spaces for people who want to dedicate themselves to certain types of activities that fall outside of the financial paradigm like having buildings where people who just want to focus on the regenerative movement could live.”
Marissa Feinberg: “If you really want to do more activism work full-time and you want to live in New York City, one of the most expensive cities in the world, who is going to pay for your rent, who is going to pay for your food? That idea was building on the universal basic income in the conversation as well. We were also discussing how storytelling was more communal in the past, and now it's become more fractured. People used to come together for theater or different community activities.”
Felissa Rubin: “One of the other things we talked about was—what does it look like to reimagine a post-‘collapse’ society? We noted the need for more stories that show us what we might gain in the future, rather than just what we will lose. Of course, a move away from our current system will necessarily include a sense of loss, but there is the potential for much to be gained as well. There’s a chance to reclaim some of what we’ve lost in our industrialized societies, like communities, gathering spaces, and collective care for one another. This is important in the ways we talk to one another about what comes next and the need to see new stories and myths in our culture about what a different future could look like.”
Daniel Pinchbeck: “The path of capitalism is to take things people used to do for themselves for free, extract it, alienate them from it, and then sell it back to them to create a market. Spring Street used to be a spring, and you'd go, and you dip your cup in the water, and you drink the water. Now we drink FIJI Water and Evian. Similarly, with media, people used to gather around a fire, and they would tell the myths and stories of the tribe and the community. They would act that out. And now we have Netflix sitting in our little boxes at home or we're on our little phone boxes and watching little stories.”
“Could it be that part of the path out is to re-engineer or return to some of those aspects of life that were actually better, that capitalism has progressively taken from us and alienated from us, and would that actually make people happier? If you go to places that aren't necessarily locked into this capitalist framework, you find that people are often happier.”
Yvette Vexta: “It's important not to outsource our storytelling on that note. I studied it recently with author Sophie Strand, who talks a lot about composting our old ideas to birth new ones. Is just that with our myths and our stories, they stopped and became written in books, and they're sold, but we can keep those and just tell them anew. That used to happen around the fireplace, telling the story in a new way with a twist.”
“Also, we were talking about how the AA 12-step program was instrumental for change, and we were kind of joking, and not joking, about how we need a 12-step program for the planet and how climate change is the shadow work that needs to be lent into on a communal scale. Not just our own personally but as a collective.”
Neil: “As others have said before, the human face of climate change is health. The way many people experience the climate crisis is through poor air quality, infectious disease, displacement, and more. So it is striking that it's taken 27 climate COPs for health finally to be featured prominently as is the case this year. Addressing climate change is as much about saving humanity as it is about saving the environment.”
Marissa Feinberg: “Fear can motivate action, but what kind of energy is that? How do we get people to fall in love with nature and to fall in love with climate action, and to really crave and want to do those things from a place of love versus fear?”
Isadora Tang: “Complexity theory… How can one understand that we are completely irrelevant and minuscule in the scheme of the universe, and also have agency and feel empowered to make change or to live differently for the world we want? And you have to hold both of those things to be true.”
Alina Zolo: “One of the interesting points of our conversation was this gentleman’s (Bennet Zelner) research on leadership, bringing CEOs and leaders to Amsterdam to do psychedelics. I asked ‘What were the results? What did you see?’ And apparently, they're good. There was sizable change and evolution in their perspective on leadership and capitalism and how they run their businesses or what they do with their lives. But then the other question we asked is, who didn't it work for? Psychedelics are not for everyone. We discussed not using the same frameworks we've been using to shape the way that we want our future to be, but perhaps stepping back and thinking about ‘what does real biodiversity of solutions look like in the psychedelic realm and in the realm of climate change?’ There's not a one-size-fits-all answer.”
Paul Mankiewicz: “We looked from what social causality is to how individuals can make a difference, not by themselves, but by these integral connectivities between a team member, between a bunch. It gets together and makes a world that then becomes something that everybody wants to replicate—it's called beauty. It's called where you want to live, and it's the right place to head.”
“The beauty of many psychedelic mushrooms, of course, is they modify serotonin and dopamine. So does, of course, an innocent mushroom like lion's mane, but so does our microbiome. So you eat the right foods, and it works together somehow at the right time, and it's because of the diversity of ourselves, our reach, and what reaches through us.”