Tag: health

Nature’s Way of Telling You: Psychedelics and Climate Awareness

As one old saw goes, in the 60s, we thought computers would enslave us, and drugs would set us free.
Jury still out on computers, but clearly the drug thing did not work out as hoped.

Obviously psychedelics have had a major impact on every corner of the culture, and I don’t think there’s any doubt that they figured prominently in the birth of the environmental movement.

There’s been a lot of research showing positive impacts on substance abuse, depression and other negative behaviors..
But I long ago gave up on the idea that psychedelics, especially in uncontrolled settings, could actually make people into, well, better people.
If you’re a jerk, they can just make you into an even bigger jerk.
For personal growth, there is ultimately no substitute for the old fashioned way – dealing with anxiety, boredom, suffering and mortality, and opening to the growth opportunities that present in every day living, working, loving or not, accepting death, (or not, and dying anyway).

That said, there can undeniably be moments, catalyzed by certain substances, that can bump us to another, more genuine path.

Bloomberg:

There’s some science to back up the woo-woo. In 2017, the Journal of Psychopharmacology published a study showing that using LSD, psilocybin and mescaline — “classic psychedelics” — led to a boost in self-reported “pro-environmental” behaviors. The study even controlled for other substances that don’t cause tracers, like cannabis, and for personality traits that might predispose participants to being green, like “openness to experience, conscientiousness, conservatism.” The result, while correlative and not causative, suggests that long-term psychedelic use changes how people think about their place in the natural world. 

Enough people to turn the tide on climate change? Not anytime soon, but early findings are intriguing. Another study, “From Egoism to Ecoism,” found a positive link between lifetime psychedelic use and “feeling close and kindly towards nature,” especially for participants who experienced “ego-dissolution,” wherein the sense of self dies during the hallucinogenic experience. 

“Psychedelics are default mode network dampeners” that “lower our awareness of the individual self,” says Joel Brierre, who leads retreats at the Tandava Center in Mexico, where participants ingest a powerful psychedelic known as 5-MeO-DMT. Mode network dampeners battle the brain system that keeps us from paying attention to the world around us; Brierre says many of his clients have emerged with new resolve to live cleaner, greener lives.

Continue reading “Nature’s Way of Telling You: Psychedelics and Climate Awareness”

Pollution of aquifers from agricultural runoff is a major and growing problem in agricultural areas across the midwest, nowhere more acutely than in Iowa, as Keith Schneider’s deep dive piece shows, below.
If only there was something farmers could do to continue making a good living on their land without having to apply huge amounts of nitrates and pesticides…oh, wait….(see David Mulla and others, above)

Keith Schneider in The New Lede:

Faced with a startlingly high cancer rate in the key US farm state of Iowa, public health leaders are taking the politically precarious step of acknowledging that preventing disease necessitates cutting exposure to potentially cancer-causing chemicals, including those used in agriculture.

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Iowa now ranks second to Kentucky in cancer incidence in the United States, and from 2015 to 2019 was the only state where the rate of new cancers increased, according to the National Cancer Institute. Rates of oral cancer, leukemia, non-Hodgkin lymphoma, melanoma, kidney, colon, and breast cancer are among the nation’s highest, according to Charlton.

The state is expected to see 21,000 new cases of cancer this year alone, more than double the number of new cancers recorded for 1973, the year Iowa began keeping records, according to Charlton. Since 1973, the state population has grown only a little over 10%.

“Some cancers in Iowa are rising and others are not falling as quickly as they are in other states,” said Charlton. “We do know that Iowans have a number of environmental exposures that could contribute to our risk of cancer.”

Exposure to nitrate in drinking water is well-recognized by scientists as a risk factor in many of the same high-incidence cancers seen in Iowa – lymphoma, breast cancer, blood, and colon cancer.

Cancer researchers, including a group from the University of Iowa, have linked various cancers to long-term exposure in air and water to trace levels of insecticides and herbicides, as well as nitrates. And Iowa farmers annually spread more pesticides (nearly 54 million pounds) more commercial fertilizer (2 billion pounds) and more animal manure (50 million tons) than in any other state, according to the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) and Iowa State University.