We cannot hope to fully repay our debt to nature. But we can give it a go

Feeling that familiar Western guilt? Motivated even to actually do something?

But what?

Never fear. You can pay money, like normal, and it’s (kind of) fine.

Plus you can also change your behaviour. I offer genuine compassion for how tough this can be. Especially when it involves not only stepping outside of your comfort zone, but abandoning the concept of comfort zones althogether.

Anthropologist and documentary film maker Nicholas Spiers is The Chacruna Institute of Psychedelic Plant Medicines’ lead researcher. He’s written an Annotated Bibliography of Key Texts on the Indigenous and Historical Uses of Psilocybin for them, and he co-directed this year’s plant medicine TV smash The Peyote Files with Chacruna founder Bia Labate. He’s also made films about Salvia divinorum and Racist Psychedelic Myths. Nick, who spent several years embedded in the Sierra Maztecha, is, like many animistic converts, not one for any sort of BS whatsoever. 

“Our own society seeks ‘catharsis’ which technically means a ‘balm’ or ‘quick fix’,” he explains, “we look at ‘unwellness’ rather than ‘wellness’ leading to a a culture of fear. True reciprocity would be a titrated experience, expanding our capacity for both the comfortable and the uncomfortable.” Sure. Can you give us an example, Nick? 

“Well, what you’re doing here on Vital is trying to address mental health. Right now, for example, bipolar diagnoses struggle to find work, and marginalised communities may display what appears as ‘psychosis’,” he replies, “The foundation of Western psychology is at fault, but nothing is done to help them or address it.”

The West currently looks to epistemology – drilling down to a single truth – to inform its purpose. Cultural beliefs, which cannot be measured empirically, don’t count towards epistemological truth.

“Plant medicine is inseparable from people”

Ontology though considers the nature of existence instead, where consistencies can still be found – including in matters less easily pinned-down, like the regularity of change or the source of creativity. 

Joseph Mays, program director of Chacruna’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative of the Americas, puts our dysfunctional dependence on epistemology into an economic frame. “The indigenous communities are suffering from the same extractive system that takes from our own environment and wellbeing. It externalises as many costs as possible,” this includes exploiting tribes and its local workers he says. So “reciprocity can happen in any relationships, human or non-human, employer to employee. Or with ones friends, family, and neighbours: “the conservation of nature requires the conservation of communities,” adds Mays.

Ernst Junger floated many of these themes in 1951’s The Forest Passage, which is gradually becoming his most referred to treatise.

Therein Junger holds court in spectacular fashion. “Before our eyes, fields that sustained owners and tenants for thirty generations are carved up in a manner that leaves everyone hungry,” he wrote in one of the first broadsides at extractive materialism, “Forests that supplied wood for millennia are laid level; and from one day to the next the goose that laid the golden eggs is slaughtered and its flesh used to cook a broth, that is shared with all but satisfies none.”

Junger’s life coaching centred on his concept of ‘the forest rebel’. I pretend to be one while I’m doing my forest bathing. Junger’s archetype focuses on retaining a sense of freedom, without plunging into the abyss of ‘fatalism’ by deciding you’d better just be more of a bastard than everyone else seems to be. Instead, you can hold on to your own morals and independence.

In Icelandic myth, Junger explains, “A forest passage followed a banishment; through this action a man declared his will to self-affirmation from his own resources. This was considered honourable, and it still is today, despite all the platitudes.” Others may roll their eyes, but really they cannot help but be impressed by your autonomy.

The forest rebel has not given up hope, either. “Freedom is prefigured in myth and in religions, and it always returns; so, too, the giants and the titans always manifest with the same apparent superiority,” quoth Junger with characteristic confidence, “The free man brings them down; and he need not always be a prince or a Hercules. A stone from a shepherd’s sling, a flag raised by a virgin, and a crossbow have already proven sufficient.”

Which leads us to handing over your disposable income. Chacruna’s Indigenous Reciprocity Initiative aims to ‘decolonise philanthropy’. Existing programs demand certain concessions from the recipients of their charity dollar; the IRI is strictly ‘no strings attached’ and works directly with 20 community groups distributing donations equally.

Reforestation, peyote conservation, traditional storytelling documentation, and a Shipibo Plant Medicine Garden that shares its seeds with other communities are only a few examples. It’s raised over $100,000 in tis first year with only 7.5% of that going on overheads. 

“Plant medicine is inseparable from people,” says Mays, “studying the perspective hinted at by visionary plants can give us a guide forwards.”

‘Be the change you want to see’ then, like the cushions at Ikea implore you to do. That trite quote is attributed to Mahatma Ghandi when he actually said was more profound: “As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is, and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do.”