Research on the usefulness of psychedelics for treating depression, anxiety, addiction, and post-traumatic stress has been growing steadily. (See here, here, here, and here for glimpses of it, and To the Best of Our Knowledge‘s recent exploration of it for a fascinating in-depth look at the topic.) I’d like to extrapolate from that research for thinking about ecocultural and climate trauma.
The recent New York Times Sunday Opinion cover piece “Taking the Magic Out of Magic Mushrooms” captures a debate brewing for years now between researchers who believe that the experiential effects of taking psychedelics — personally challenging and transformative experiences turned into life-shaping narratives — are central to their healing effects, and those who believe those experiences can be removed and the effects retained.
We could call these two camps the “experientialists” and the “biomedicalists.” For the former, any kind of pill that “rewires” the brain but does not involve some sort of memorable and transformative experience (like this one) is treating symptoms rather than causes. For the latter, the experiences are incidental by-products of what’s really going on, which is neurological, not experiential.
Everything I have come to believe, supported by process-relational theory (the ontological perspective that’s come to make most sense to me), suggests that the pill-popping, non-experiential kind of treatment will never be the “real thing” because experience is central to all that is important to us. (On experience, see my posts here, here, and here.)
But it also suggests that in order to be effective, the experiential and the material (or neurological) will have to occur hand in hand. Powerful experiences will have neurological impacts; powerful neuro-stimulating drugs, if their impact is to last, will be accompanied by powerful experiences. The experiential is the meaningful “inside” to the evidential, which may be visible to “outside” forms of measurement, but do not last unless they are made habitual, or literally “inhabited,” by their bearers, who live in the narrative, experiential time of human life.
This puts my thinking in line with the work of researchers like Robin Carhart-Harris, for whom, as Dana Smith puts it, “you can’t change your brain that much that quickly without feeling it — and experiencing something extraordinary — and if you don’t feel anything, you may not have changed all that much.”
The relevance of all this to our current socio-ecological crisis might be obvious, but in case it isn’t, let me spell it out.
As a crisis that is lived, not just heard or read about, the climate crisis, with all the associated sociopolitical and psychological repercussions of it, is experienced by increasing numbers of people as debilitating, anxiety-producing, and depression-inducing. Theories of eco-anxiety, ecological grief, environmental melancholia, solastalgia, and climate trauma are all meant to capture this. Eco-trauma is analogous on the collective level to what PTSD and other forms of depression are on the individual level — a disorder arising from a felt sense of disconnection, uprootedness, or severance from the world in which one might feel “at home.” (The Greek root “eco-” literally means home or household.)
Zooming out further, the climate crisis is continuous with what some would consider the broader crisis of the modern, colonial, industrial, capitalist world, within which relations between land and community — among Indigenous, colonized, and “traditional” peoples in particular — have been severed repeatedly and violently. Some of us are becoming traumatized, others of us inherit generations of trauma, but all of us are somewhere on the eco-trauma spectrum as we face the reality of our collective situation. (It’s a new form of spectrum disorder.)
If healing individual forms of trauma is best done through powerful, motivating, and transformative experiences (accompanied by psychoactive stimulants when necessary), then healing the debilitation around the larger crisis — both the climate crisis and the crisis of the Anthro-Colo-Capitalocene — will also require some collectively neuro-transformative experiences.
People who’ve undergone conversions to newly motivating belief-systems, whether religious or ideological, have some experiential understanding of what this means. The traditional environmental movement has long featured individuals (like John Muir) whose “peak experiences” in the natural world provided them with the motivation toward activism. The climate justice movement is no different except that its transformative experiences tend to involve people and perceptions of injustice and deep solidarity across difference.
These kinds of experiences can be elicited by life changes and suddenly impacting situations, such as those encountered in collective crises like natural disasters (which are not always so “natural“). Whether they can be elicited by drugs seems almost a pointless and trivializing question (though it recalls the urban legend of hippies pouring LSD into urban water supplies). But whether there are artificial or biomedical facilitators to such experience may not be.
What we are talking about here is a kind of neuroplasticity at the collective level — how can humans become more open to transformative experiences? — which carries with it the question of how the right kinds of transformative experiences can be elicited. Plasticity, after all, comes with its risks (as Maoists and other radical “reprogrammers” have shown), facilitator abuse being only one of them.
There is no question in my mind that dealing with the global eco-crisis will require collective cultural change — changes in the ways we live, the habits we pass on, the design of our cities and neighborhoods, and the ways we make sense of our relations with the world around us.
The “we” implied by all those phrases is far from a singular one, and one of the sources for enabling collective change is in fact that very non-singularity: the cultural diversity represented by Indigenous peoples and other marginalized communities can and ought to be a source of change and of resilience (as climate archaeologists have recently shown and as ecocultural identity theorists have argued). It is one of the places we can look to for guidance on the “deep reprogramming” human society will require in the coming decades.
That being the case, experience with and among cultural others, including communities epistemologically distant from one’s own cultural background, is therefore an important potential source of the ecocultural resilience humans will need. That’s an argument for travel (ethical travel, to be precise) — which goes against the arguments for localism that I summarized in a recent post. But it’s also an argument for a culturally and ecologically diverse education.
U.S. citizens do not need to travel to the Amazon to encounter cultural difference; Indigenous reservations, minority communities, and deep cultural difference are all a lot closer than that. There are models for how to make that “difference” more accessible at a formative time in people’s lives. Canada’s Katimavik program was such a model: a youth volunteer service program created by Pierre Elliott Trudeau’s government in the 1970s, it provided young Canadians with the experience of cultural diversity in addressing social and environmental needs in their own country. (Its differences from other youth corps programs are outlined here.)
Such experiences, which bring young people together to perform collective work within culturally diverse environments, can provide opportunities for growth that enable a certain “transformative rewiring” to take place among those most vulnerable to climate depression and eco-anxiety. It’s those kinds of experiences I often encourage among my own students when they consider what to do upon graduation. (I wish those programs were more readily available.)
All of that may seem far from the societal uptake of psychedelic experience — within “safely” ritualized (if not medicalized) contexts, as has been suggested by psychedelic researchers. But if real experiences are the partner of neuropsychological change, then all manner of experiences ought to be considered, not just those facilitated by pharmaceuticals. There are many other ways to promote cultural awareness, which I won’t get into here, but the point is that life-changing experiences are a helpful part of this “cultural adaptation.”
Peter Brace’s recent article “Altered States of Consciousness: Natural Gateway to an Ecological Civilization?” provides a helpful overview of the implications of psychedelic research for ecological attitudes. Brace contextualizes the literature within a systems-theoretical perspective that sees psychedelic experiences as promoting a “fundamental modulation in the quality of cognition” that can “disrupt[…] entrenched and dysfunctional ways of thinking.” (Among the article’s more original contributions are Brace’s reference to Peircian semiosis, including plant semiosis.)
Given Brace’s ambitious subtitle, I can only hope that China’s “Ecological Civilization” boosters (who are many and widespread) will chance upon the article and take its implications to heart. That may be hoping for too much too soon, but given the Chinese government’s power over nearly one in five humans, I suspect that’s the scale we need to be operating at if we are to find a “gateway to an ecological civilization.”
