Radical Strategies: Cultivating Eco-Consciousness Through Wonder and Psychedelic Experience

Environmentalists have long worried about humanity's estrangement from nature, and the emotional, psychological, and ethical consequences. In a world dominated by virtual and human-built environments and insulated from the rhythms of nature, concerns about our alienation from nature have intensified. To the extent that they occur at all, direct encounters with nature increasingly take a negative form, as seen in ever more destructive and erratic storms, fires, and floods driven by climate change. Entire bodies of literature have sprung up to address the psychological toll of cascading losses entailed in habitat destruction, species extinction, and climate chaos.¹ Though not an official mental health diagnosis, "ecoanxiety" is defined by the American Psychological Association (APA) as "chronic fear of environmental doom." An APA survey in 2020 found that more than two-thirds of Americans are "somewhat or extremely anxious" about climate change and its impacts.² Grief and anxiety emerge as responses to losses that have already occurred or are in the process of occurring, and they can also present as anticipatory responses to environmental losses expected in the future. Negative emotions that suffuse our experiences of the natural world can lead to disaster fatigue, paralysis, and even nature avoidance, all of which may hamper motivation to engage in environmental action and nature protection at a time when urgent response is critical. "Everyday alienation from nature is establishing itself as the norm, and we are confronting loss on a scale we find difficult to acknowledge and process."³

Feelings of disconnection from the natural world may be compounded by the sheer abstractness of many global environmental issues. Extinction and climate change are two of the most pronounced indicators of the environmental crisis, but they are not always easy to perceive. For all the traumatic immediacy of climate events like floods, fires, droughts, and violent storms, there remains something incomprehensible about the scale of environmental change, a quality that eludes our everyday grasp. The sheer enormity of the current environmental crisis and its significance on a geological time scale can make it difficult to process at a phenomenological level. As Glenn Albrecht, a leading theorist of environmental mourning, observes, "There is now a mismatch between our lived experience of the world, and our ability to conceptualize and comprehend it."⁴ The very idea that human activity could alter or disrupt a planet's entire climate system seems unthinkable, even blasphemous, to some.

Well-meaning climate scientists have attempted for years to educate the public on the difference between weather and climate, reinforcing the idea that particular extreme weather events, in themselves, are not directly traceable to climate change, even while a changing climate may make extreme weather more likely.⁵ Thus, even when climate change appears to us in tangible form, expert opinion advises against extrapolating from discrete events to a broader global phenomenon. Of course, there are good reasons for distinguishing weather and climate change (there is the danger of interpreting a cold winter as counterevidence to rising global temperatures, for example), but excluding climate change from the realm of everyday experience entails risks as well. We may be inclined to doubt our ability to sense these changes, and in failing to sense them, we are less likely to confront them.

Extinction, for a variety of reasons, is also a difficult concept to pin down. A common account of extinction defines it as the death of a species, a phenomenon that no one experiences directly (even in cases where researchers document firsthand the death of a species' last remaining members). Scientists often employ more specific definitions than those familiar to the broader public. Species can be extinct locally (extirpation) without being globally extinct, and a species may be considered "functionally" extinct when it is no longer considered viable or its population declines to the point that its role in an ecosystem in greatly diminished. However extinction is defined, it is difficult to perceive and process an absence, particularly one that is occurring largely out of sight. Indeed, the very concept of a species, whether defined by behavioral, morphological, or genetic...