By Shayla LoveJun 27 2019
After taking LSD, Bill stood in his kitchen in Merseyside, England, staring at a large tree. When the tree started to speak to him, Bill only found it strange that the tree didn’t formally introduce itself, he told VICE in 2017.
During the rest of their 15 minute chat, the tree clued Bill into the profound fact that all life on earth—plant, animal, and human—was intimately connected. “It was as if someone was inside my head judging my feelings, my thoughts, and my emotions,” Bill said. “It was also a two-way street, though: I could feel how old he was—he’s obviously been through a lot with the way the earth is and how the town I live in was built up around him.”
Anyone who has tripped—especially outdoors—knows that psychedelics, like LSD, mushrooms, DMT, or mescaline, can provoke sensations of awe and wonder at the natural world. This has been replicated in more formal settings too—in January 2018, scientists from Imperial College London found that psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, led to a significant increase in feelings of connection to nature after just one dose. Seven to 12 months later, that increase persisted.
“Before I enjoyed nature, now I feel part of it. Before I was looking at it as a thing, like TV or a painting…” one person in the study said. “[But now I see] there’s no separation or distinction, you are it.”
Psychedelics have been shown to help with addiction, anxiety, and depression. But outside the scope of mental illness, researchers are also asking how they can change personality traits and beliefs. An increase in nature-relatedness has been shown to be a unique predictor of happiness. But it is also associated with the planet’s well-being: There’s a demonstrated link between having a relationship to nature and pro-environmental behavior.
A psychedelically-imposed connection with nature could do more than make for a Alice-in-Wonderland-esque story later. In the face of an impending climate crisis, there’s a need to know why some people are motivated to act environmentally and others not.
The United Nations recently said that there are only 11 years left to prevent “irreversible damage” from a warming Earth. And yet a Pew Research survey from 2017 found that while three-quarters of Americans were concerned about personally helping the environment, only one in five actually make an effort in their daily lives. Meanwhile, the 100 companies responsible for 71 percent of global emissions take no decisive action to curb their impact, nor do governments hold them accountable.
In the face of an impending climate crisis, there’s a need to know why some people are motivated to act environmentally and others not.
Researchers find that bombarding people with facts about climate isn’t the best tactic. Dissecting the psychedelic experience could help policy makers, scientists, and journalists attempt to recreate the core feeling of relatedness that the drugs bring about: the sense that nature is a part of us, our bodies, our lives, and that we are a part of it. Capturing that might lead people to act to protect the planet, since the planet is an extension of themselves.
Ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote back in 1949, that “we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Since then, many other ecologists and social psychologists have proposed that a disconnection from nature is partly to blame for our inertia in responding to the climate crisis.
“The ecological devastation we are experiencing now is a side effect of a nature disconnection,” said Sam Gandy, an ecologist and scientific assistant at the Beckley Foundation, a psychedelic research group in the U.K. “Reconnecting us to nature is something I see as one of the most important things we can be working towards right now as a species.”
Of all the factors that predict for pro-environmental behavior, nature-relatedness and connectedness are the most important, Gandy said. And people who use psychedelics not only report more connectedness, but are also more concerned about the environment than those who use other types of drugs.
We’ve seen this before: In the 1960s and 1970s, frequent use of psychedelic drugs coincided with widespread environmental movements. Some propose that it’s not a coincidence that these things came about together. But proving that the drugs cause environmentalism is a tough claim to make, since perhaps the type of people who take psychedelics also happen to care about the environment.
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Psychedelics promote pro-environmental activity via a much-discussed phenomenon in the drug research world called ego dissolution.
“This is a fundamental component of where the ego is thought to reside, your sense of self,” Gandy said. “When that’s relaxed, it essentially dissolves your sense of self as being something separate from the universe. So perceived boundaries between self and other break down and result in a self-nature overlap.”
Once a person starts to humanize nature, or anthropomorphize it, they may start to feel empathy. “If I feel close to nature or feel one with nature, I start to ascribe human-like attributes to nature,” Forstmann said. “Like the capacity to feel pain or to be sad. If I feel that nature is suffering, then maybe I want to treat it better.”
Forstmann is now working on a placebo-controlled trial that will look at the effect on nature-relatedness and ego dissolution from psychedelics. This stricter study design could help rule out some other confounding factors, one being that people often trip in nature, making it difficult to differentiate the impact of the outdoors on the drug experience.
Still, taking a psychedelic and dwelling on previously held ideas could simply reinforce them. To turn someone environmentally unmotivated into an activist, they should be introduced to the concepts of nature-relatedness and the importance of climate action during the trip, Dolen said. If that’s done during a re-opened window of plasticity, then those effects can last well beyond the duration of the drugs’.
“Then, you could teach them that new relationship to the earth,” she said.
To turn someone who is environmentally unmotivated into an activist, they should trip while being introduced to the importance of climate action.
So should we give everyone psychedelics in the woods in order to save the planet? In a GQ interview, Michael Pollan, the author of the recent exploration of the life-changing nature of psychedelics, How to Change Your Mind, acknowledged that psychedelic experiences could possibly address the “environmental crisis, born of our sense of distance from nature: our willingness to objectify nature and see it merely as a resource.”
But he followed up with a dose of reality: “Then you need to stand back and say, ‘Wait, is it possible to prescribe a drug for an entire country?’”
Psychedelics are still illegal, and not suitable for everyone—some people with a family history of psychosis could be at risk with these compounds. But figuring out how to promote, as Aldo Leopold called it, a sense of “we-ness” without the drugs could help protect the planet from future harm.
End excerpt. Full Vice article here: https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/j5w49p/if-everyone-tripped-on-psychedelics-wed-do-more-about-climate-change?utm_source=stylizedembed_vice.com&utm_campaign=j5w374&site=vice
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Here are Climate Depot’s small sampling of wacky mental health climate articles below.
Yet another claim: Psychology Today: ‘Rising Temperatures Could Worsen Mental Health’
Latest Warming Fear Mongering: Climate Change Makes Us Go Crazy
USA Today documents how climate alarmism harms mental health– ‘It is merely the fear of a climate crisis and feelings of guilt that trigger mental health harm.’
USA Today documents how climate alarmism harms mental health
Eco-psychology: NEW Free helpline, handbook promotes ‘Climate Change Psychological Support Network’
The rise of mental illness among our young blamed in part on — climate change!
Alarmists ignore mortality rates blaming global warming for suicides
Study links ‘climate change’ to rise in suicides
‘Global warming’ linked to increased suicide rates
Study uses MRI brain scans to examine the ‘Neurobiology of Climate Change Denial’
STUDY: ‘Global warming’ causing an increase in ‘ecological grief’ – Published in the journal Nature Climate Change– ‘Ecological grief as a mental health response to climate change-related loss’ — The journal Nature Climate Change – April 2018
The authors of the new study claim: “We anticipate, along with a small but growing number of scholars, that ecological grief will become an increasingly common human response to the losses encountered in the anthropocene.”
Study Makes Bizarre Claim That ‘Global Warming’ Could Alter People’s Personalities– A new Columbia Business School study is out with the latest bizarre claim about man-made global warming — it could alter people’s personalities. “As climate change continues across the world, we may also observe concomitant changes in human personality,” reads the study, published in the journal Nature on Tuesday.
‘Good Grief!’ Climate Change Makes Warmists Depressed & Gives Them ‘Literal Nightmares’
Foreign Affairs Mag: ‘The Problem With Climate Catastrophizing – The Case for Calm’ (Written by Oren Cass)
Climate researchers and activists, according to a 2015 Esquire feature, “When the End of Human Civilization is Your Day Job,” suffer from depression and PTSD-like symptoms.
The Washington Post offers “the 7 psychological reasons that are stopping us from acting on climate change.”
‘Catastrophism can also lead to the trampling of democratic norms. It has produced calls for the investigation and prosecution of dissenters and disregard for constitutional limitations on government power.’
‘And yet, such catastrophizing is not justified by the science or economics of climate change. Working with a catastrophic mindset and a century-long timeline, one can construct an apocalyptic scenario from almost any problem.’
Under a political advocacy campaign launched Wednesday, a coalition of physician groups will tell the public that their health is threatened by catastrophic man-made global warming, also called climate change. Participating doctors will also urge government action to reduce the damage believed to be caused by human emissions of greenhouse gases.
On Wednesday, the consortium issued a report titled, “Medical Alert! Climate Change Is Harming Our Health.”
“Here’s the message from America’s doctors on climate change: it’s not only happening in the Arctic Circle, it’s happening here,” Sarfaty said in the press release. “It’s not only a problem for us in 2100, it’s a problem now. And it’s not only hurting polar bears, it’s hurting us.”
Sarfaty has made numerous contributions to Democratic candidates, including former president Barack Obama, 2016 presidential candidate Hillary Clinton and Massachusetts Senator Elizabeth Warren, according to the Federal Election Commission’s website. The consortium is run by The George Mason University Program on Climate & Health.
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Climatologist Dr. Roger Pielke Sr. responded with a ‘bullshit meter’ rating the claim as ‘total BS’
Warmist Meteorologist: ‘Climate Change’ and Trump Have Driven Me to Therapy –Meteorologist Eric Holthaus: ‘I know many people feel deep despair about climate, especially post-election.” And it’s because of this, “There are days where I literally can’t work,” and “We don’t deserve this planet.’
Psychoterratica — environmentally induced mental distress
A new study shows why we’re polarized about climate change
Fed Study: ‘Climate change’ threatens hearts, lungs but also brains
The peer-reviewed study by eight federal agencies can be found here.
‘Climate change also threatens mental health, the study found. Post traumatic stress disorder, depression, and general anxiety can all result in places that suffer extreme weather linked to climate change, such as hurricanes and floods. More study needs to be done on assessing the risks to mental health, it said.’…
John Holdren, Obama’s senior science adviser, said steps the world agreed to in Paris last year to curb emissions through 2030 can help fight the risks to health. “We will need a big encore after 2030 … in order to avoid the bulk of the worst impacts described in this report,” he said.
Climate Skeptics May Be Too ‘Mentally Ill’ to Buy Guns Under Obama’s New Rules
Aussie Study: ‘Climate Change’ Is Taking ‘A Toll On Farmers’ Mental Health’ (Based on survey of 22 farmers in one town)– “Increasingly variable weather was having a negative impact on many farmers’ wellbeing.”
“Uncertainty about growing conditions is having a noticeable impact on farmers’ mental health, according to a recent study out of Australia’s Murdoch University. To understand how climate change is impacting farmers’ mental wellbeing, Neville Ellis, from Murdoch University’s Centre for Responsible Citizenship and Sustainability, interviewed 22 farmers from the Australian town of Newdegate.” “One subject referred to the state of farmers’ mental health as akin to seasonal affective disorder — except that instead of suffering from lack of sunlight, farmers are suffering from a lack of rain.”
Carbon causes PTSD (Stressed, anxious, violent? Blame climate change)
Claim: ‘In America, 200 Million People Will Suffer ‘Psychological Distress’ From ‘Climate Change’