B5. Resilience, Third Nature, and Transition

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09-12 * 13:00 - Learning and Education (franco)

Many individuals and companies eager to reduce their climate impact purchase carbon “offsets,” paying for an equivalent amount of carbon to be removed via projects that protect or restore forests, wetlands, and other natural ecosystems that sequester carbon.

But these schemes haven’t been as effective as hoped, in part because they create an incentive for quantity over quality of nature-based climate solutions, researchers argue in a new study published in the journal Nature.

“Currently, nature-based climate solutions and forest carbon markets are struggling to deliver effective climate mitigation,” says study team member William Anderegg, a forest ecologist at the University of Utah. “Our study provides a roadmap to improve these programs in four critical areas and also proposes a novel funding mechanism that could support projects without carbon offsets.”

The study focuses on forests because of their ability to capture such large volumes of carbon. But forests don’t just store carbon; they can also change patterns of cloud cover, release volatile organic compounds and aerosols, and alter the color of the landscape. All of these changes can have either a warming or a cooling effect. So the first requirement for an effective project is to make sure that it results in net cooling, the researchers say.

Second, in order to truly benefit the climate, projects must keep carbon out of the atmosphere for the long term. Most projects don’t guarantee carbon will be kept out of the atmosphere anywhere near long enough. And disturbances from wildfire, drought, pests, and so on can upend even the best intentions. Anderegg and his collaborators are working on strategies for assessing and managing disturbance risks, and aim to publish their findings in the coming months.

Third, a nature-based carbon sequestration project must result in additionality, meaning climate benefits beyond what would have occurred without it. You can’t sell carbon credits for not cutting down a forest that wasn’t going to be cut down anyway. But it can be difficult to estimate alternative outcomes in a rigorous way.

 

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Finally, projects need to account for “leakage:” It’s no good preventing a forest from being cut down if a different forest just gets cut down instead.

The researchers also propose an alternative to the current system of carbon offsets, suggesting that corporations could instead make financial contributions to climate mitigation. Although this wouldn’t aid them in the quest to say they had achieved net-zero emissions, it could be a more scientifically and legally sound way to reduce their climate impact and avert accusations of greenwashing.

Companies could set aside a certain amount of money per ton of emissions to contribute to nature-based climate solutions (essentially levying a carbon tax on themselves), or commit to contributing a certain percentage of profits to such projects.

“An estimated US$27 billion per year could be generated if just 141 high-profit companies spent $100 per ton they emit, representing a small percentage of their profits,” the researchers write.

A contribution approach would reverse the current incentives in the field and instead create a drive for quality over quantity, with project developers striving to create the most effective, most rigorously documented forest carbon sequestration projects.

“What consistently surprises me is how fast this space is evolving and changing,” says Anderegg. “Innovation is excellent, but it has to be based on the best available science and come with careful policy changes to reflect that science. That’s what’s needed next.”

Source: Anderegg W.R.L. et al. “Towards more effective nature-based climate solutions in global forests.” Nature 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine.

 

Development roadmap This section is used to document the development process v.0.1.1 - Oct-Dec 2020 * First requirements listing * Testing first codebase for REEVOTech in stand-alone mode * File tree design * Internal code repositories deploymentweaversCMMCMMCMMCMMCMM

Reducing meat consumption is one of the most powerful levers to bring down greenhouse gas emissions: this is now widely acknowledged. But something that gets less attention is how eating less meat could also improve water quality. 

A new study presents the case, showing that replacing just 10% of meat with alternative proteins in the United States could have a large potential impact on groundwater—a major source of drinking water in the country—reducing the risk of water pollution there by up to 20%.

Although agricultural groundwater pollution is a global problem, the U.S. was a good starting point for the research, as the global leader in annual meat consumption. Livestock require large amounts of feed, which itself requires significant inputs of nitrogen fertilizers to grow—one third of which is lost to the environment each year in the U.S. The result is that half of groundwater from the main aquifers sampled in the country contain nitrate concentrations above natural levels.  

Increasing meat consumption therefore doesn’t bode well for the long-term health of these reservoirs and the people who rely on them. The question is whether meat alternatives would be much better, considering that they all require agricultural inputs, too. 

To investigate, the researchers considered beef, poultry, and pork, and compared these to three protein alternatives: plant-based protein, insect-based protein, and cultured meat. Looking at the period between 1985 and 2020, they assessed the impact of conventional meat production methods on groundwater quality, and then used a model to simulate the potential changes that would result from a switch to the protein alternatives in each case.

Firstly, their study showed that the growth of agriculture, and livestock in particular, has consistently increased groundwater nitrate exceedance—the point at which nitrates pass the designated safe limit for environmental and human health—over the last 60 years in the U.S. 

The next clearest trend the researchers picked up on through their modeling analysis, is that beef is the most resource intensive across the board—consuming more fertilizer, water, land, and producing more greenhouse gases than any other variety of meat or meat-alternative. It was followed by poultry and pork. 

 

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However, the meat alternatives aren’t footprint-free. Many plant-based meat alternatives are made from soybeans, which of course require fertilizers to grow. Insect protein farms, too, are often supplied with a diet of crops to sustain them. Even cultured meat that’s produced in a lab depends on corn and soybean feedstocks: on average, a kilo of cultured meat requires 5.6 kg of corn and 0.03 kg of soybean to sustain it, the study says.

And yet, despite the associated fertilizer use, meat alternatives still had a significantly lower groundwater impact. Per unit of protein generated, plant-based alternatives in particular stood out: “By directly consuming plant protein rather than raising animals for feedstock conversion, plant-based meat consumes fewer soybeans, which requires minimal fertilizer”—26.4 grams of fertilizer per kilo, compared to beef’s 519.5 g, the researchers explain in their work. 

This translated to significantly lower groundwater impacts in the simulation. Calculating across the three alternatives, switching just 10% of meat consumption in the U.S. to plant protein, insect protein, or cultured meat, would reduce fertilizer use by 3.4%. That’s enough to cut the risk of nitrate excess in groundwater by 20%. That would reduce the number of groundwater sites currently registering unhealthily high levels of nitrates by up to 16%. 

This depolluting effect could be much greater if the U.S. ate even less meat and more alterative protein. For instance, substituting 50% of meat with alternatives holds the greatest potential for reducing nitrate pollution, the researchers found. But at these higher rates, there were trade-offs that revealed some nuances of the American agricultural landscape. 

For instance, in regions of the country where corn and soybeans are intensively farmed, a dramatic national increase in the consumption of alternative proteins could trigger to an expansion of crop production that leads to more fertilizer being dumped into the soil and infiltrating groundwater. So the solution may not be as simple as blanket-switching to alternative proteins. 

The researchers also note that the groundwater benefits of eating less meat also depend to some degree on precipitation levels, and how much water regularly infiltrates the deeper layers of the soil. In drier regions, for example, their proposed dietary switch would have measurably more success at keeping nitrogen out of groundwater. 

With these nuances in mind, the researchers settled on 10% substitution as a starting point—an amount small enough to be feasible, which could still deliver significant benefits to water quality, human, and ecological health. 

Zheng et. al. “Changes in meat consumption can improve groundwater quality.” Nature Food. 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine / Ai-generated

An educational video on the World Health Organization’s calls it “the plastic problem that no one is talking about.” They mean cigarette butts, the most common type of plastic litter globally. Per the WHO, 4.5 trillion cigarette butts are thrown in the environment every year.

Conventional and electronic cigarette butts not only contain plastic, they are loaded with nicotine salts, heavy metals, and lead. When disposed improperly, cigarette waste leaches that toxic waste into the environment. But now researchers have found a use for those cigarette butts.

Instead of litter on roads, they propose using the butts as an additive to asphalt that would strengthen roads. In a new study published in the journal Construction and Building Materials, they say that the additive would improve crack resistance and reduce the need for repairs.

To increase the sustainability of transportation, there has been a push recently to include recycled materials in road construction. Waste plastic, bio-based materials and scrap tire rubber have all been put to use to make roads.

A convenient, plentiful material for recycled roads though is old asphalt that is removed from road surfaces during maintenance or reconstruction. This recycled asphalt can be crushed and mixed with new asphalt or concrete to make the base material for roadways.

But old asphalt does not have the same strength and low-temperature resistance, so it can make roads deteriorate faster. So it has to be mixed with special chemical agents, and for this mixing to be uniform, encapsulating the recycling agents in fiber pellets is key.

 

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So a team from the University of Granada and the University of Bologna found a way to encapsulate the recycled asphalt into fibrous pellets made from waste e-cigarette butts. E-cigarette filters are made mainly of cellulose and polylactic acid fibers. After removing the ashy residue from the ends of used e-cig filters, the team shredded and mixed the clean e-cig butts with a wax binder. Then they pressed, heated, and cut the mixture into the form of pellets.

Finally, the researchers mixed the pellets with old asphalt and added about 40 percent by weight of this mixture to fresh asphalt material. When the pellets come into contact with the hot fresh asphalt, the wax melts and releases the recycled cellulose and plastic fibers from the cigarette butts.

The fibers reinforce and strengthen the asphalt and also make the material more ductile and flexible, making it more resistant to cracking under stress. Tests showed that the encapsulated recycling agent showed six times higher crack-resistance than pellets made only of the e-cig waste fiber. Plus, the wax changes the asphalt’s viscosity, allowing it to be produced at lower temperatures, which consumes less energy.

The researchers write that “future research should focus on optimizing the production processes for recycling agent-encapsulated fibre pellets or increasing the dosage of recycling agent to further enhance their performance characteristics.”

Source: Yunfei Guo et al. Use of engineered pellets containing E-cigarette butts and a recycling agent for stone mastic asphalt mixtures incorporating recycled asphalt. Construction and Building Materials, 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine

Stop for a minute and picture a few endangered species. What came to mind? For most, it’s probably charismatic animals like a wolf, condor or dolphin. Some might go a bit further and think of insects, like monarch butterflies. Perhaps plants—rare orchids, ancient redwoods.

But will anyone think of a soil-dwelling fungi? I thought not.

Now maybe you will, if a group of scientists get their way. They just released a global map of mycorrhizal fungi, along with a paper in Nature that documents a troubling phenomenon. While these fungi are critical to plant health and sequestering carbon, less than 10% of the most species-rich spots on the planet enjoy any official protection.

“For centuries, we’ve mapped mountains, forests, and oceans. But these fungi have remained in the dark,” said Toby Kiers, an evolutionary biologist and executive director of the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN), which created the new map. “This is the first time we’re able to visualize these biodiversity patterns—and it’s clear we are failing to protect underground ecosystems.”

It’s easy to see why they have gone under appreciated. These organisms form hairlike underground networks that are easy to overlook. Even if you are digging around in the soil, you might not notice a handful of tiny white threads in a spadeful of dirt.

Despite their invisibility, these fungi are biological marvels critical to life on the planet. They form vast interconnected systems that shuttle nutrients such as nitrogen and phosphorous to plants, while collecting carbon in return. Scientists have tracked how these seemingly simply organisms can form smart “waves” that spread through the soil, homing in on the most promising plant roots. At least 80% of plant species are known to be plugged into these networks. The carbon funneled into the soil by these fungi totals 3.6 billion tons per year, a third of global fossil fuel emissions.

 

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But a lot isn’t known about these species and their health. A tiny fraction – .001% – of the Earth’s surface has been sampled in the search for mycorrhizal fungi. To begin assembling a more complete picture, scientists with SPUN and universities around the world turned to artificial intelligence.

They compiled data from 25,000 soil samples containing more than 2.8 billion fungal DNA sequences representing more than 150,000 different species. They then used that information to train a high-powered computer model to predict where the different fungi are likely to occur across the planet. The model took into two dozen different factors that seemed to influence what fungi turned up in a bit of soil, including soil chemistry and structure, climate variables such as average temperature and rainfall, the types of vegetation and the geography. The result is a set of digital maps that predict the mycorrhizal fungi of the Earth’s land surface broken into 1-kilometer squares.

These maps reveal that not all parts of the planet are created equal. Some places stand out for the rich variety of soil fungi or for the high numbers of unique, rare fungi. Those locations vary depending on the type of fungi. Arbuscular mycorrhizae (AM), which integrate themselves inside the cells of plant roots, are the most common, found in around 80% of all plants, including crops, grasslands and tropical forests. Their hotspots are concentrated in tropical regions of South America, Africa and Asia. Less common ectomycorrhizae (EcM) form a sheath around a plant’s roots, rather than penetrating the root cells. They are concentrated in cooler places like boreal forests in Canada and Siberia. Some of the rarest ectomycorrhizae, however, are predicted to be in far flung places including northern tundra, mountain forests in Indonesia and conifer forests in Central America.

While the maps reveal these fungi occur just about anywhere you find plants, it also shows that places with the richest or rarest fungal communities frequently lie outside protected areas such as national parks. Just 9.5% of the most biodiverse fungal hotspots occurred in land with some kind of protection. The picture for the rarest collections was slightly better, with 23% of those places protected.

It’s perhaps no big surprise that conservation efforts up to this point haven’t focused on species that, though important, are largely invisible and not very charismatic. Scientists involved in the project hope these new maps will call attention to what’s underfoot, and help make future decisions about where to protect or restore ecosystems more fungi-friendly.

“For too long, we’ve overlooked mycorrhizal fungi,” said Merlin Sheldrake, a biologist, SPUN member and author of the bestselling book about fungi, Entangled Life. “These maps help alleviate our fungus blindness and can assist us as we rise to the urgent challenges of our times.”

Van Nuland, et. al. “Global hotspots of mycorrhizal fungal richness are poorly protected.” Nature. July 23, 2025.

Image: ©Anthropocene Magazine/AI-generated

Open-pit mines around the world have enough room for solar panels to generate more than 4,700 terawatt hours (TWh) of electricity per year, according to a new study. The findings represent the first global analysis of an efficient new approach to renewable energy siting.

Solar power is growing fast in many countries, and that’s stimulating increasing land-use conflicts. The locations that are good for generating this renewable form of energy also tend to be valuable for agriculture, or host important natural ecosystems.

Instead, why not put solar farms in locations that are already disturbed and aren’t being used for anything else—such as abandoned open-pit mines?

The idea has a lot of potential advantages. Abandoned mines tend to have decent road access and solid connections to the grid, ready-made infrastructure that could be useful for solar installations. What’s more, solar projects on abandoned mine sites could also help revitalize mining community economies.

A few hundred abandoned mines around the world host solar installations, but these are scattered, pilot-scale efforts so far. Until now, no one has gotten a handle on the global potential of the approach.

In the new study, researchers gathered publicly available information about the locations of open-pit mines and used an artificial neural network to analyze the feasibility, optimal placement, and power generation potential of using open pit mines as solar installations.

There are 61,822 mining patches around the world that are larger than 10,000 square meters, the area necessary for a sizeable solar farm, the researchers report in the journal Nature Sustainability. Collectively, these mining patches cover 47,900 square kilometers.

That’s about ten times the area covered by solar facilities globally in 2018.

 

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What’s more, the mines are at least as promising locations for solar as existing solar farms, the researchers found when they analyzed potential power generation across both types of sites. Solar panels installed at all these mine sites could produce 4,764 TWh per year, enough to meet projected 2050 electricity needs at a global scale.

In reality, solar panels would best be deployed on spent mines that have been left alone for a while, so as not to interfere with either ongoing mining activities or restoration efforts. (However, solar could also aid restoration by keeping bare soils from drying out or blowing away and making it easier for plants to get established.)

The researchers analyzed vegetation changes over time via remote sensing data to zero in on abandoned mine sites. They constitute the majority of mining patches globally—39,737 of them.

How much abandoned-mine solar gets built out and how fast will depend on global economic growth, electricity demand, and the prices of clean energy and fossil fuels. Exactly where it gets built will depend on things like the local economy, available sunlight, and ease of access to the site.

The researchers fed 16 such factors into their artificial neural network and used it to estimate the probability of solar installations across the world’s mining patches. China, Chile, the United States, Australia, and Russia have the greatest potential for abandoned-mine solar, essentially because they have the most expansive mining industries.

“Given the vast area of open-pit mining sites in China, if fully used, the country could become the largest producer of solar energy globally, with productions reaching 849.5 TWh of electricity, which is nearly equivalent to its total electricity consumption for the year 2023,” the researchers write.

Meanwhile, the largest group of near-shovel-ready projects are found in the Mediterranean region. In contrast, Africa has great sunlight conditions at mining sites, but relatively few mines—and infrastructure and policy barriers to turning them solar.

Anywhere in the world, though, it will take government policy and financial support to take abandoned-mine solar from a niche idea into the mainstream, the researchers say.

Source: Wang K. et al. “Deploying photovoltaic systems in global open-pit mines for a clean energy transition.” Nature Sustainability 2025.

Image: Alan Levine via Flickr.

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The Landscape Lab, on the campus of the University of Utah in Salt Lake City, is a stormwater management landscape designed that serves as stormwater infrastructure but also as a research and demonstration facility. The steep slopes of the catchment basins represent standard institutional landscape practice: plants are planted into holes in weed barrier fabric … Continue reading Recognizing Rights and Responsibilities for Plants in the Metropolis →

On Bear Creek Road in Catlettsburg, Kentucky, a small butcher shop has stood the test of time, serving farmers and families for over fifty years. What began in 1969 with Bill Opell has transformed into a family legacy, now carried forward by his granddaughter, Laura, and her husband, Brad Maggard. They’ve brought new life to the shop while honoring the traditions that made it a cornerstone of the community. 

Laura, the youngest granddaughter of Bill Opell, grew up surrounded by the sights and sounds of the family business. After earning her degree in agriculture at Morehead State, she spent over eight years as an Extension Agent in Lawrence County, always staying true to her agricultural roots. When her aunt and uncle closed the shop in 2022 after running it as Bear Creek Meats for over a decade, Laura found herself fielding calls from local farmers, desperate for a nearby butcher. 

“A lot of places were just too far, and more and more people were wanting to raise their own animals, especially after the pandemic,” Laura said. “So I thought: This is our family business, all the equipment is still there, let’s do this.” 

In May 2023, Laura and Brad reopened Opell Meats, once again providing a crucial service to farmers and families from all the counties surrounding Boyd, and beyond.  

“There’s not a whole lot of places like us anymore. Years ago, every small town had a butcher shop, and now that’s just not the case. We get people from over two hours away.” 

Running a small cow/calf operation in Boyd County themselves, Laura and Brad understand the needs of local farmers firsthand. Brad, who serves as the Fire Marshal for the City of Ashland, spends his spare time assisting with slaughter, maintenance, repairs, and anything else the shop demands. Each day, Laura can be found behind the counter, slicing sandwich meat, wrapping orders, and keeping daily operations running smoothly. 

Opell Meats is more than just a butcher shop—it’s a community hub.  

“It’s a generational thing,” Laura explains. “People have been coming here for years. They loved my grandfather, and they keep coming back. We’re a family operation, so we know our customers, what they like, and what they don’t like.” 

During the peak processing months of October through March, the shop is bustling with farmers bringing in cattle, hogs, and deer. Despite the shop’s recent upgrades, some of the original equipment, like the 1970s grinder and saw, are still in use, standing as a testament to the quality and durability of old-school craftsmanship. 

In addition to processing beef and pork, Opell Meats offers a variety of products, including deli meats, frozen chicken, and seasonal specialties like heart-shaped steaks for Valentine’s Day and winter meat bundles. They also work closely with local producers, offering prime beef, BBQ beef jerky, eggs, and more. As a custom processor, they cater to individuals and families who use the meat for their personal families or to provide to their neighbors. 

Laura and Brad’s daughters, Caroline and Evie, are already part of the family tradition. “They’re like our little mascots,” Laura laughs. Like her, the girls are active in 4H, attending county fairs and supporting local agriculture projects. Opell Meats proudly supports 4H and FFA students across four counties by purchasing animals at auctions, which helps support their 4H projects for the next year.

As May approaches, the shop is gearing up to celebrate its two-year anniversary with a customer appreciation event, complete with lunch and a big sale. It’s a way to say thank you to the community that has supported them through generations. 

The Mountain Association is honored to have provided flexible financing for initial inventory and technical assistance for setting up their QuickBooks and accounting systems.   

Follow along the Opell Meats journey and its living legacy via their Facebook page here. 

The post From Grandfather to Granddaughter: The Next Chapter of Opell Meats  appeared first on Mountain Association.

Louisville Gas & Electric and Kentucky Utilities are anticipating a huge increase in the amount of electricity they will need to produce over the next 15 years, in large part due to the possible data centers coming in to power AI. In a plan they submitted to the state’s Public Service Commission, they said they will soon be asking for approval to build (and charge customers for) new gas plants at a cost of $3.7 billion. But what happens to this investment if the data centers never get built? Or they are built with their own solar or other power sources? And what will be the impact on ratepayers?

Before LG&E-KU comes to the Public Service Commission asking to build gas plants that would be a 40-year investment for customers, we need:

• A commitment by LG&E-KU to examine and mitigate the impacts of their choices on their customers, especially low-income residential customers.
• A good faith effort from the utilities to evaluate the costs to meet the demand of new corporations with cheaper and more resilient options.
• A lot more certainty that data centers will actually be built and a promise that data center investors will be responsible for covering the costs of investments to serve them so that they don’t put the burden on ratepayers. Additionally, confirmation that LGE and KU can meet the carbon emissions standards that many of these corporations likely have.
• And more.

Interested in these issues? Read the below write-up for how you can get involved.

Energy utilities like Louisville Gas and Electric and Kentucky Utilities are regulated by the Kentucky Public Service Commission (PSC) to ensure safety, fairness, and reliability of services. Every three years, each electric utility must submit an Integrated Resource Plan to the PSC, outlining their strategy for meeting future energy demands over the next 15 years. Utilities can include plans for new power plants, renewable energy, and energy efficiency/demand reduction programs. LG&E and KU’s plan includes a lot of the first, less of the second, and very little of the last.

LG&E and KU filed their plan in October 2024, which includes strategies approved by the PSC in 2023, such as two coal retirements, a new natural gas plant, a battery storage project, energy efficiency programs, and two solar projects. However, it also stated that 637 megawatts of solar, approved in 2023, will not move forward. To put this in perspective — 637 megawatts of solar could serve the energy needs of approximately 70,000 homes!

To summarize the plan, LG&E and KU expect economic development to increase the demand for electricity by 30-45% by 2032, primarily driven by the possibility of new data centers coming to Kentucky. To meet this forecasted growth, LG&E and KU are proposing to spend $3.7 billion on additional gas plants, which could drive higher rates for the next 40 years, while investments in energy efficiency and local distributed energy resources – think rooftop solar and advanced batteries – would be cheaper and bring more benefits to customers. LG&E and KU’s IRP does not consider how these options can, just as well, meet the expected demand.

Report after report shows that renewables are cheaper than coal, and likely cheaper than natural gas, especially in the long run. Despite what you hear in the news, renewables can increase reliability and provide backup power during extreme weather, and distributed renewables and associated storage allow for microgrid developments and “virtual” power plants. With storage, they can also reduce peak load, which in turn reduces threats from events such as blackouts with Kentucky’s 2022 severe winter storm. Many states are already leading the way for how to transition to clean energy while ensuring reliability and affordability, and many companies are looking to locate in states whose utilities have power sources that meet their emissions standards.

With already high rates, additional rate increases could contribute to the affordable housing crisis and other cost of living issues many Kentuckians are already experiencing. High energy costs strain household budgets, reduce disposable income, and can put households at risk of being disconnected due to overdue bills.

Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, Kentucky Solar Energy Society, Metropolitan Housing Coalition, and the Mountain Association, represented by Kentucky Resources Council and Earthjustice, are jointly intervening on LG&E and KU’s Integrated Resource Plan on behalf of low-income families to ensure that rates remain affordable and promote reliable, safer energy sources. However, we need your help!

There is a public process for people to engage in PSC and utility decisions, but many people don’t know about the PSC, and they don’t know how to participate. Unfortunately, if the public doesn’t speak up, the PSC only hears the utility and business perspectives and can’t make the best decisions for everyday Kentuckians.

It is important that citizen voices, like yours, are heard. You can submit a public comment by simply emailing the PSC at psc.comment@ky.gov with your statement, your name, and case no. 2024-00326, or visit the Kentuckians for Energy Democracy website to file a public comment using their talking points.

A version of this op-ed was published in Kentucky papers in March 2025 written by Sarah Pierce of Metropolitan Housing Coalition with support from the intervening groups.

The post LG&E and KU’s Plans Could Cost Kentuckians More on Their Bills appeared first on Mountain Association.

We live in turbulent times on many fronts. The reality of life under a federal government that was bought and paid for by extractive industry is crashing up against a booming energy transition that has been earnestly underway for a decade. Renewable energy provides nearly a third of electricity globally and it is forecast to continue to grow, largely due to basic economics: it is simply cheaper to install these technologies. But even renewable electricity isn’t a panacea, and risks remain as some of the same players and structures that built the grey economy begin to angle for a piece of the new green economy. Behind all of this, of course, is a global climate system that pays little attention to politics or economics, and the impacts of our supercharged atmosphere are increasingly being felt on a daily basis. 

Understanding and parsing the complexity of our current resource situation is a challenging task. In this week’s newsletter, we hear from brilliant movement scholars about the pathway to a just transition for clean energy, from a leading philosopher on the moral implications of using water for fracking gas extraction, and join an extraordinary writer and activist as he delves into risks of a potentially dangerous fossil-fuel technology known as carbon capture and storage.

Want more news like this? Sign up for the Bioneers Pulse to receive the latest news from the Bioneers community straight to your inbox.

‘Charging Forward’: The Promise and Perils of Lithium Development in Imperial Valley

California’s Salton Sea region is home to some of the worst environmental health conditions in the country. Recently, however, it has also become ground zero in the new “lithium gold rush”—the race to power the rapidly expanding electric vehicle and renewable energy storage market. The immense quantities of lithium lurking beneath the surface have led to predictions that the region could provide a third of global demand. But who will benefit from the development of this precious resource?

In this excerpt from “Charging Forward: Lithium Valley, Electric Vehicles, and a Just Future,” co-authors Chris Benner and Manuel Pastor examine the valley’s history, the economic and social structures behind its agricultural boom, and how they set the stage for today’s lithium development—raising critical questions about how the next boom will impact those who live and work in the valley. 

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When Water Becomes a Weapon: Fracking, Climate Change, and the Violation of Human Rights

Water sustains our living world, but as environmental advocate, moral philosopher and award-winning author Kathleen Dean Moore writes, it can also be a dark and dangerous thing. In the following essay, Moore, Distinguished Philosophy Professor Emerita at Oregon State University, examines the impact of fracking on this precious element. The essay, “When Water Becomes a Weapon: Fracking, Climate Change, and the Violation of Human Rights,” is an excerpt from volume three, “Water,” of the five-volume anthology series “Elementals” from the Center for Humans & Nature. 

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Keynote Speaker Spotlight: Wade Crowfoot – Natural Resources Secretary – State of California

Wade Crowfoot, on the frontlines of environmental leadership throughout his long career in the public and non-profit sectors, California’s Natural Resources Secretary since 2019, leads efforts to conserve California’s environment and natural resources, overseeing an agency of 25,000+ employees spread across 26 departments, commissions, and conservancies charged with stewarding the state’s forests, natural lands, rivers, water supplies, coasts, wildlife and biodiversity, as well as helping oversee its world-leading clean energy transition, including a commitment to conserve 30% of its land and coastal waters by 2030. Secretary Crowfoot has led efforts to navigate California’s record-breaking droughts, floods, and wildfires and has initiated a new era of partnerships with the state’s Native American tribes.

Catch Crowfoot and other visionary speakers at the 36th annual Bioneers Conference in Berkeley, California, from March 27-29. 

Learn more

A Landscape of Lies: The North Dakota coal town I grew up in is now the world test site for a potentially dangerous fossil fuel technology.

In this essay from Earth Island Journal, author, activist, and Bioneers speaker Taylor Brorby tells of growing up in a North Dakota coal town, where he spent many days fishing on Nelson Lake — a man-made body of water created to help with fossil fuel extraction that sits in the shadow of the Milton R. Young Power Plant. Reflecting on those waters, which because of discharges from the plant never freeze despite the harsh winters of North Dakota, Brorby examines the new fossil fuel technology of carbon capture and the environmental consequences of the underground storage of liquified carbon dioxide. Through personal narrative and investigative insight, Brorby questions the promise of this new technology and the stories we tell ourselves. 

Read now

Upcoming Bioneers Learning Courses

We’re so excited to share this new season of Bioneers Learning courses! We’ve designed this season of both live and asynchronous courses for leaders like you — those who seek empathetic, intersectional conversations with leading activists and experts on the issues you are passionate about. Together, we will reimagine philanthropy, learn to harness nature’s timeless strategies to drive social transformation and build emotional resilience for frontline activism. 

• Reweaving the Dream of Our Future: How to Tell Powerful Stories to Change the World | April 10-May 1, 2025 | This course is designed for those who feel called to harness the power of storytelling to inspire personal and collective change. Together, we will explore how to be effective storytellers and how to communicate a vision of what’s possible. 
• EveryWoman’s Leadership: Cultivating Ourselves for Full-Spectrum Flourishing | April 16-May 7, 2025 | Guided by Bioneers co-founder Nina Simons, this four-week experiential program invites women, female-identifying individuals, and allies into a transformative space to cultivate inner awareness, relational intelligence, and clarity of purpose. 
• Biomimicry for Social Innovation: Nature’s Lessons for Movement Leaders | May 13-June 3, 2025 | This four-week experiential course reveals how biomimicry—a practice that draws on the genius of ecosystems—can inform leadership, partnership building, and decision-making for lasting, regenerative change.
• The Four Sacred Gifts: Indigenous Wisdom for Modern Times | Self-Paced | Discover how the Four Sacred Gifts of forgiving the unforgivable, unity, healing, and hope in action provide us with a path to our most grounded, loving, healed, and generous selves.
• Regenerative Agriculture: Nourishing the Soil, Healing the Planet | Self-Paced | Be enlightened on the practical applications and impressive potential that regenerative agriculture has to revive healthy landscapes; contribute to human and animal health; create an equitable food system; and help heal the climate.

Learn more 

The post The Future of Energy: Can We Achieve a Just Transition? appeared first on Bioneers.

Two decades ago, Jeremy Narby challenged conventional thinking with his book Intelligence in Nature, exploring the cognitive abilities of plants, animals, and other living systems. Since then, science has rapidly advanced—and much of what was once considered fringe is now mainstream. In this conversation with Bioneers Senior Producer J.P. Harpignies, Narby reflects on the book’s legacy, the ongoing battle over nature’s intelligence, and how Indigenous knowledge and Western science can (or can’t) be reconciled.

Narby is also the author of The Cosmic Serpent: DNA and the Origins of Knowledge (1998) and co-editor of Shamans Through Time with Francis Huxley.

This interview, conducted on Feb. 18, 2025, has been edited and excerpted for clarity.

J.P. HARPIGNIES: Jeremy Narby, thanks so much for doing this. Before we jump in, I wanted to just explain to our readers why we wanted to interview you on the 20th anniversary of the release of Intelligence in Nature. The main reason is that we at Bioneers felt that the book was far ahead of its time and wasn’t done justice by the reviewing community and the general public when it came out, but it was an important marker for us, and hopefully it will get more attention (or at least historical recognition) going forward. 

I wanted to go over a few of the themes of the book for those who are less familiar with it or haven’t read it in quite a while. It seems to me that there are three main topics of your book. One is a travelogue: you took journeys to go meet scientists around the world who were working at the cutting edges of studying cognition and decision-making among a wide range of other-than-human species. The second aspect of the text was a further exploration of a core theme in your life’s work—the comparison between shamanic ways of perceiving the world and Western scientific ways, and exploring if there’s any way to reconcile those different cognitive approaches. And finally, the subtitle of the book indicates that it was also an inquiry into the mysteries of the mind, of how we can even know what we know. Those were the three big themes, in my estimation. 

And I wanted to start with your visits to scientists’ labs around the world. These included Charlie Munn observing Amazonian macaws in the field; Anthony Trewavas studying plant cognition; Martin Giurfa in Grenoble proving bees understood abstract symbols; and your trip to Japan to visit two scientists, one studying the amazing visual capacities of butterflies, and the other one slime molds’ astonishing capacities to solve mazes. And you also mentioned a lot of different studies of sponges, amoebas, nematodes, octopuses, parrots, leaf-cutter ants, etc.: there was quite a lot in there. 

It was pretty clear in all your conversations with these scientists that the old Cartesian model of animals as dumb automatons and humans as the only ones possessing intelligence was already crumbling in the scientific world, but they were still somewhat outliers, and there was still some hesitancy in using the term intelligence. But since your book came out, there’s been an avalanche of every week yet another finding by another scientist studying yet another species’ exhibiting intelligent behavior. Just to mention a handful who have been at Bioneers, we had Suzanne Simard studying trees communicating and sharing nutrients and information through mycelial webs; and speaking of mycelial webs, Merlin Sheldrake and Toby Kiers and the group at SPUN doing extraordinary work studying the decision-making capacities of mycelial networks; and we had Monica Gagliano who discussed her experiments showing that plants could recognize sounds and react to them appropriately. And at this coming conference, we’re going to have Project CETI, the Cetacean Translation Initiative, the marine biologists using AI to decode whale language; the point being that there’s so much work that’s been done these past two decades in this domain. 

So, do you feel vindicated after all these years, first of all, or do you just feel pissed off that your book wasn’t more widely recognized at the time? And secondly, do you feel that the battle has been won re: the breakdown of the old Cartesian model, that sort of cognitive anthropocentrism, or do you think there’s still a lot of entrenched resistance to the idea of intelligence permeating the natural world? 

JEREMY: Well, that’s a handsome and generous question, because feeling vindicated or pissed off are two pretty good options, but, strangely, neither—I was never pissed off, in fact, because I knew that it was, let’s say, from the start, a kind of an outsider discourse that was meant to make people think and question their own categories, concepts, and presuppositions. It was a book for Westerners, even, let’s say, Western materialists—who grew up like I did, thinking that plants were just kind of thermostats or things. Yes, they had osmosis, they did things such as growing or absorbing water and nutrients, but it all happened by normal physical, chemical processes, as they used to say. I mean all of life was supposed to be just a normal physical, chemical process back at that time, but especially plants, because we’re talking the 1990s, early 2000s. It was already clear that there were animals such as dolphins and primates that were more than just the kind of machines that Descartes had in mind 400 years before. But plants were still pretty much forbidden territory. If you started talking about plant intelligence or plant decision-making or plant behavior even, people would start rolling their eyes and start suggesting that you’d taken too much of that Amazonian liana thing. 

And I was always coming at it as an activist for the rights of Indigenous Amazonian people, and part of that work was to get their way of knowing the world, their Indigenous knowledge, Indigenous science, whatever, to be better understood and appreciated. I mean, Western science has been using Indigenous knowledge for a long time, using the plants identified by Amazonian people, but there again the attitude was always something like: “Well, they’ve been living there a long time, they’ve had enough time to wander around the forest and identify a few things that work, and there’s nothing very mysterious to it.” There always had been that kind of tendency to disparage what Indigenous people knew, while at the same taking their remedies from them, thank you very much, and patenting them and so forth, all of that late 20th Century scene. 

And my whole point was to say that these people have a sophisticated way of looking at plants and animals, and they do live, after all, in the world’s most intense environment, the Amazonian Rainforest, with the greatest number of species, many of which Western science hardly knows or doesn’t even have names for. There are more names for plants in Amazonian Indigenous languages than in Latin given by scientists, and that’s still true today, but do they know more about plants than we do? Well, actually, the problem for mainstream science is that they talk about plants as if they’re people. According to the Indigenous vision, powerful plants such as tobacco have a personality or a “mother,” an owner, and to modern science, that is anthropomorphism, a cardinal sin. 

The basics of Indigenous knowledge often sort of flew in the face of the basic tenets of Western science, but it’s clear that these people have impressive knowledge about all these different plants that we don’t even have names for. And when you asked them how they learned what they knew about plants, they’d invariably say: “We have these ayahuasquero, tobaqueros who eat psychoactive plants, and, in their visions, they communicate with the owners or the personalities of these plants that are powerful entities. Each species has one.” But that way of knowing, even though it leads to these concrete results, is not considered kosher by Western science. You’re saying you’re taking hallucinogens and that in your hallucinations you’re learning about the fundamental principles of these different organisms. That can’t be true; it’s an epistemological impossibility; you’ve got to be nuts if you believe that. In other words, that’s the definition of psychosis—taking your hallucinations seriously.

If you’re steeped in a modern rationalist/materialist worldview, when you try to make sense of what the Amazonian people say about their knowledge about plants and animals, you run into the limits of your own system of knowledge.

So, if you’re steeped in a modern rationalist/materialist worldview, when you try to make sense of what the Amazonian people say about their knowledge about plants and animals, you run into the limits of your own system of knowledge. Personally, I always thought that was interesting. It was kind of scary, because I had to write a doctorate at Stanford at the time, and admitting to taking the hallucinatory knowledge of Indigenous Amazonians seriously in 1986 would probably not have led to getting my Ph.D.

But to get back to the context of the book. I had written Cosmic Serpent ten years before. This year is the 30th anniversary of that text. That was a pretty radical work. In Intelligence in Nature, I wanted to tone it down a bit and to go visit scientists rather than shamans because it seemed to me that what many of these cutting-edge researchers were saying about their recent findings resembled what shamans had been saying all along, so in a way it was a sort of attempt at a Trojan Horse, using what scientists were saying to reveal the wisdom of what shamans had long held.

And, this may sound strange, but, also: I believe in science. In general, I’m not that interested in believing; I’m more interested in knowing, but I really do think, deep down, that when science is well done, it can lead to basic fundamental knowledge that is dependable. Now, clearly, Amazonian people have been doing something right with their approach. They’ve achieved a whole bunch of dependable knowledge about plants. You eat the wrong plant, you can die. They know which plants are poisons, which are remedies, and which are hallucinogens. They’ve even got hallucinogens for dogs. They have really a whole range of knowledge, and the plants they use are so diverse compared to what we know, and their approach has its coherence, but when you listen to them describe how they know, their systems of knowledge, they’re radically different on key points from the modern scientific approach. I thought that was interesting. 

I was saying that these people we’ve looked down on for so long actually know some interesting things we don’t know, and that we need to challenge our presuppositions and arrogance. So, the book was meant as a kind of antidote, a kind of medicine.

It was clear to me from the start that there were not going to be limousines, red carpets, prizes, speeches in front of enraptured mainstream audiences for my point of view because it went against the grain. I was saying that these people we’ve looked down on for so long actually know some interesting things we don’t know, and that we need to challenge our presuppositions and arrogance. So, the book was meant as a kind of antidote, a kind of medicine. Not a bitter pill, exactly, because the whole point of doing a travelogue was to put some sugar coating on the pill, to turn it into an adventure, go to different places, meet people, listen to them. Lo and behold, they’re talking like shamans, these scientists. Isn’t that interesting?

It was designed to be a bone to be chewed on, but I was surprised by how few people actually bought it, how few people wanted to chew on it. You try to be ahead of the curve a bit, but sometimes when you’re too far ahead of the curve, people don’t get it. That’s a risk you take when you throw curve balls. Sometimes they’re not strikes. 

JP: Let’s get back to the scientists for a moment. One thing you mentioned in your book is that this is actually not a new debate. You cite that Darwin, for example, in his description of ants, was really impressed by their capacity to make decisions and organize their societies, so it’s not as though there weren’t voices out there, even in the foundational moments of modern Western science who had a different view of intelligence in nature. But I asked you earlier about all the research in the last two decades that seems to confirm what you were saying about the ubiquity of intelligence in nature in your book. Do you feel that we’ve reached a tipping point?

JEREMY: That’s an interesting question. I had been working in the ‘90s in the Amazon, and then I wrote Cosmic Serpent, which led me to think more deeply about the theme of intelligence in the natural world. It seemed to me to offer a common denominator between shamanic and Western perspectives, so I thought that writing about it wouldn’t be too controversial. After all, the people I was quoting were respected scientists discussing the topic. So, I wrote Intelligence in Nature, which came out in 2005, and just that year, a few months after my book came out, the Society for Plants and Neurobiology was founded. I had in 2003 interviewed Anthony Trewavas, one of the people who was spearheading this new movement in plant biology looking at intelligent behavior in plants seriously, looking at it in terms of what goes on in the cells of a plant as it makes decisions and integrates information and so forth. But then these scientists started getting shot down by mainstream botanists, and that battle has been unfolding for the last 20 years. 

The question What is a plant? looks like a simple one, but how you answer it will depend on your view of the world, whether you’re a materialist reductionist, a romantic mystic, or a shaman. That question What is a plant? is therefore almost a religious question, and, as we know, getting people from different religions to agree on something is very hard.

Since then, I’ve followed with interest the spectacle of mainstream biologists shooting at the plant neurobiology researchers, saying that it can’t be true, that plants don’t have brains and can’t have intelligence, etc. If you’re interested in looking at the presuppositions of Western culture, there is something about plants that really brings out what people believe about the world. The question What is a plant? looks like a simple one, but how you answer it will depend on your view of the world, whether you’re a materialist reductionist, a romantic mystic, or a shaman. That question What is a plant? is therefore almost a religious question, and, as we know, getting people from different religions to agree on something is very hard. 

And that’s interesting because plants are the majority organisms on the planet. I think 82% of the biomass is plants. They’re the most successful organisms in the biosphere. Animals compose something like 0.4%, I think, of the biomass. Plants must be doing something right. They enable the atmosphere. They draw the sun’s energy out of the cosmos and turn it into food for all the rest of us, but modern Western cultures have had this view of plants as being totally unlike us, not intelligent, just things, objects with no agency or decision-making ability in their behaviors. But now, that’s been changing, even though there’s been resistance in science against the plant neurobiology thing, there’s just too much research to dismiss at this point. It’s been shown, for example, that certain plants start producing chemicals that poison gazelles when gazelles start eating their leaves, and then they use Jasmonic acid to communicate with other nearby plants that haven’t yet encountered gazelles, so those plants can prepare and start producing the gazelle toxin in advance. Once you include in your definition of what intentional behavior is something like producing chemical substances, then plants are behaving intentionally all the time; they’re master chemists. 

Anthony Trewavas himself said that what changed it for him as a plant scientist in the 1990s was when scientific instruments and investigative processes got advanced enough to be able to intercept signals between plant cells to observe what is actually happening at the cellular level when a plant reacts to something in its environment, integrates the information and makes a decision. It turns out that the cells inside the plant are sending one another signals, some of which are identical to the ones that our own neurons send each other. And that signaling happens quickly. The old idea used to be that plants are slow. We can use timelapse photography to reveal their movements, but actually they’re very slow. And in our culture, we associate slowness with stupidity, but actually, while yes, they do operate at a time scale that is much slower than ours, the cell signals that go on inside a plant, as that plant is going about perceiving, making decisions and enacting those decisions, happen in real time at a speed similar to what happens inside our own brain, hence the birth of the field of plant neurobiology in the early 2000s.

The battle over plant intelligence goes on. Peter Minorsky recently wrote an interesting piece about the history of the plant neurobiology revolution and the resistance to it, but the fact is that even some of the scientists who have been attacked for being too “out there” conduct experiments that are methodologically impeccable. Monica Gagliano is a prime example. She is criticized because she isn’t shy about expressing her beliefs about plant intelligence and admitting her own use of psychoactive substances, but she uses reductionist, materialist, replicable, rigorous methods in her experiments. I’m a big fan of her work. Being able to prove plant decision-making and perception in a rigorous, well-designed experiment is one way knowledge advances. 

When I started visiting scientists in the early 2000s, I was apprehensive at first. I had some prejudices against scientists. I thought that they would be kind of closed-minded, white coat-wearing, suspicious of an Amazonian anthropologist type, but I remember being truly surprised. I had chosen them because they were studying things that I thought were spot on, such as the butterfly visual system—What do butterflies see? How do they act on visual information? Or bees that have a capacity for abstraction and can interpret similarity and difference and handle such concepts in their sugar grain-sized brains. Or the Japanese fellow who was putting a single-celled slime mold in a maze and showing that it solved the maze. Having spoken with these men (they were all men, though at least they weren’t all Westerners), I was surprised by how open-minded they were. They were modest, epistemologically humble, aware of the limits of their knowledge, as science should be, like Darwin. You go out into the world, you explore it, you accumulate all kinds of data, then you scratch your head for years and you try to make something coherent out of it, but it starts with observing what the roots of a plant actually do, or what goes on in the brain of a bee. It doesn’t start with anything else. There is something beautiful in good, humble science, and traveling to meet these different scientists confirmed that for me. 

There is something beautiful in good, humble science, and traveling to meet these different scientists confirmed that for me. 

JP: Yeah, a lot of great science has really pushed the boundaries, but there is still quite a lot of resistance to any warm and cuddly feelings toward other species. We recently had Suzanne Simard at Bioneers, and she’s been getting a lot of push-back. Part of that is that many scientists work for extractive industries that are threatened by the spread of affection and respect for plants and animals. In her domain, the wood extraction industry employs many experts in silviculture, in the same way that a lot of veterinarians work for the cattle industry, so significant strata of the scientific world resist any shift in worldviews that would make their livelihood and the livelihood of their patrons more difficult.

But let’s move on to another question. It’s clear from your work and from what you’ve just said that you developed a deep respect for Amazonian Indigenous worldviews during your initial period of immersion in the region in the 80s and that you also value modern scientific approaches to acquiring knowledge. And, in fact, a lot of your life’s work has been an attempt to compare and to reconcile these two very different pathways to obtaining knowledge. I’ll put my cards on the table here. I too have deep respect for both these traditions, but they seem to me to be coming from such divergent perspectives that I’m not convinced they can really ever be fully reconciled. But, as you say, the scientists you interviewed were speaking more like shamans, so do you feel that your effort to try to reconcile these two ways of knowing is progressing, getting closer to a possible resolution of some kind, or do you think that these two such different methodological strategies will remain irreconcilable for the foreseeable future?

JEREMY: I don’t think that they’re irreconcilable. Once you take everybody’s costumes off and you just look at what individual scientists know and how they arrive at what they know, and at what Amazonian shamans might say about the same kinds of questions, it’s at its core not that different. They all see plants and animals and want to know how they work. Some plants can be remedies. How do we use them to heal people? What does healing actually mean? They’re all interested in trying to heal people and in plants that might help people heal, and they’re all interested in understanding the properties of plants. We do live on the same planet, after all. We’re part of the same species.

 Once you take everybody’s costumes off and you just look at what individual scientists know and how they arrive at what they know, and at what Amazonian shamans might say about the same kinds of questions, it’s at its core not that different.

But, yes, we have different approaches to knowledge. It’s kind of like two languages that require translating to become comprehensible to each other. In Italian, they say “Il traduttore è un traditore”—the translator is a traitor, because anytime you say something in one language, to actually say it with the same kind of feeling and true content in another, you often have to change the terms, and their order. If you just translate it directly, you’ll be losing meaning. A good translator is going to deconstruct it and betray the original, but reconstruct it into something that actually in that context is the best solution and comes closest to doing the job. So, there’s not always an exact correspondence of concepts, but you can go back and forth between radically different languages and do decent translating. 

And once you put something in French, it’s no longer in English. That’s true. Once you look at it from a shaman’s point of view, you are no longer looking at it from a scientist’s point of view, and there are some things that are to a certain extent incommensurable. They don’t fit into each other; they don’t have the same terms. One thing that’s really striking is that often in science, individuals, including myself, are interested in universals. We don’t just study one river, we study rivers, river systems, but when you go to a place where Indigenous people live by a river, they’re relatively uninterested in rivers, but they know a lot about their river. They love their river. They have stories about their river. They may have some knowledge about other rivers, but they just don’t approach the whole thing in that way. 

Another example I like is an episode that a Brazilian neuroscientist told me about. Two or three years ago some brain scientists from the Czech Republic got interested in ayahuasca states and decided that they really wanted to do electroencephalogram readings in the rainforest with Indigenous shamans while they were singing their songs in their own settings. This had to be participatory research, so they had to get the people they wanted to work with, the Huni Kuin Kaxinawá people, on board. They went to Acre to meet them. They explained that they had this new machine that could do these measurements and withstand the humidity of the tropical forest, but the Kaxinawá said: “What’s all this preoccupation with the brain? When we hunt animals, the brain is the only thing we don’t eat, the only part of the body that is without interest. And here you are, showing up, and all you want to do is measure activity in the brain. Why?” That’s a great illustration of Indigenous people and scientists approaching the same elephant but not necessarily at the same level and with the same interest, and not touching the same bits of the animal.

But that’s why I don’t think the two approaches are irreconcilable: it’s still the same animal. We’re living on the same planet. Everybody wants to understand more about plants, animals, what it means to be alive, how to avoid illness, and so on. So, yes, scientists are hard for Indigenous Amazonians to understand sometimes, and vice versa, because they speak different philosophical languages, but I think it’s possible and interesting to become bilingual. One metaphor is that the Amazonian perspective can offer a sort of reverse camera angle. In a televised sporting event, you have the main camera angle, and then when you have a reverse angle, you can see the same action but from the other side of the field. The reverse angle can show you things that the main angle doesn’t, so, being able to go back and forth and say, okay, let’s see how the other side would see this, can offer you new insights. Another metaphor is to think of them as different maps of the same territory that you can superimpose to get a more complete understanding. 

Knowledge is knowledge. If it’s dependable, then it’s knowledge. Indigenous people have developed dependable knowledge, and scientists have done the same.

And finally, that’s what we’re after—knowledge is knowledge. If it’s dependable, then it’s knowledge. Indigenous people have developed dependable knowledge, and scientists have done the same. So there’s no reason, given that they peddle in the same thing, that they shouldn’t be able to do this together. I argue against the irreconcilability of these two ways of knowing.

JP: There are two other topic areas I’d like to cover. The subtitle of your book is “an inquiry into knowledge,” and in the book, you talk about the brain quite a lot. You have a whole chapter on the pile of jelly that is the brain. You really wrestle with the hard question of consciousness and discuss how little we know about how our cognition works or how we arrive at our sense of a self. Your conclusion in the book is that we’re really at the infancy of coming close to understanding that, but do you think that that’s something that might ultimately be unknowable, no matter how many brain studies we do?

JEREMY: I know that I’m far from the first to point out that the subject that we’re dealing with in this question is the same that is trying to come up with the answer, and that is, I think, obviously part of why this may well be out of reach for quite some time. In other words, can the human mind understand the human mind? 

Well, there’s no reason why it should be able to understand itself. If you look at it, it has evolved mainly to understand everything except itself. There we are. We’re on this planet. We’ve got to survive, avoid being eaten by mega fauna, find food for tonight. For tens of thousands of years, we’ve been paying attention to everything around us, but certainly not what’s in between our two eyes, but now science has reached that point at which it can turn its attention to the human brain, human consciousness. Here is this kilo-and-a-half of jelly. How does conscious experience spring out of it? Well, that’s the famous hard question of consciousness studies.

I’d feel completely at ease with the idea that it’s going to take tens of thousands of years to get anywhere close to getting a good understanding of how our conscious experience springs out of that mass of jelly inside our skulls.

I’d feel completely at ease with the idea that it’s going to take tens of thousands of years to get anywhere close to getting a good understanding of how our conscious experience springs out of that mass of jelly inside our skulls. But, hey, if somebody’s going to deliver the explanation in the next 50 years, I’d be pleased to eat humble pie. 

JP: Yeah. I always felt that it’s akin to the problem of understanding death. One is trying to understand absence of consciousness with consciousness. It seems to me to be the wrong tool for the job. But another question I have is about your cultural influence. You were really one of the most influential figures in getting a lot of people interested in Amazonian shamanism and in the larger psychedelic revival that came about starting in the ‘90s. After the explosion of the ‘60s and early ‘70s, things went more underground, and when they exploded again, The Cosmic Serpent helped inspire quite a few people to want to explore these things. I was wondering how you feel about what’s happened to that domain in the interim, because that explosion of interest in psychoactive plants and psychedelics in general has led to a number of epi-phenomena, everything from parts of the Amazon being overrun by spiritual tourists, similar to India in the ‘70s, to venture capitalists rushing to cash in, to weird belief systems spreading in the psychedelic world. Conspiracy theories of all kinds have been rampant in some of those milieus, including some emanating from the far right. How do you feel about the whole world of psychedelics now, and do you have any second thoughts about your participation in having contributed to popularizing sacred plant use? 

JEREMY: I’m a long way from feeling responsibility. First of all, when I wrote the book and published it in 1995 (the original French edition of The Cosmic Serpent), I would never have thought that people would say: “Where can I get some of that stuff that makes you vomit and see terrifying fluorescent serpents?” Westerners, at that point, were eating Ecstasy, maybe taking small doses of LSD to go to the discotheque. They were not interested in gut-wrenching purges and serpentine visions. 

But, to my surprise, when I gave my first talks after publishing the book, people would come up to me afterwards and they’d ask where they could get some. It was as if I’d been talking about some interesting drug or something, and they really felt that they needed it. I realized afterwards that in the 1990s, a saturation point seemed to have been reached by a lot of Western people, a minority certainly, but still a noisy one, were questioning Western culture and Western medicine. Quite a few of them were ready to leave their culture to go and suffer, to go and purge, to go on a kind of pilgrimage. This is how ayahuasca tourists have been described by anthropologists—pilgrims searching for knowledge, searching for self-healing by going to distant cultures and suffering. Around the same time, other pilgrimages were becoming immensely popular, such as the St. Jacques de Compostelle/Camino de Santiago trail.  

So, in the 1990s, more and more Westerners had begun questioning their consumerist culture, allopathic medicine, and monotheistic religion, looking for other approaches to healing. Ayahuasca was part of that. I got lucky for once: the book was right where the curve was. It was a sweet spot. Lots of people read it. I didn’t have to do any publicity; it sold itself. It’s still selling, because it tapped into something that just happened to emerge at the point where the book was there. But did the book cause that interest? I doubt it, and, in any case, you don’t control your readers. I always put an emphasis on verifying knowledge, giving sources, showing that it’s complicated, but there will always be some readers (of anything) who go overboard. Many years ago, a woman called me up, all upset because her husband had read my book and started taking mushrooms, and then he was taking mushrooms all the time and going everywhere with my book and reading bits of my book to people he didn’t even know, i.e., going crazy. But what are you going to do? I certainly didn’t want that to happen. Still, despite such isolated cases, 99% of the people who read the book actually got the message without losing their minds.

As to the Westerners who have become ayahuasca-guzzling, conspiracy-theory minded types who are also into white supremacy or what have you, this is where science should be taken into consideration. The word psychedelic means “revealer of psyche.” Stan Grof, the Czech psychiatrist who invented psychedelic psychotherapy back in the 1950s said when you take a psychedelic such as LSD (and this applies to ayahuasca as well) you don’t really have an experience of a drug, you have an experience of yourself. It takes the lid off ordinary consciousness, and all kinds of things in the deep human psyche come out, so it really depends on who you are when you take one of these things. As Stan Grof put it, they’re “non-specific amplifiers.” 

If you’re an ambitious, aggressive, patriarchal kind of person, if you take ayahuasca, there is a good chance it’s going to make it worse. They’re well aware of this in the Amazon. There’s a lot of sorcery associated with psychoactive plant use there. Using those plants can be a form of knowledge acquisition, and knowledge can confer power, which is inevitably double-edged, so you’ve got to pay attention. But that’s also true of scientific knowledge. I’m all in favor of knowledge, be it scientific or shamanic, but when certain forms of knowledge get into the wrong hands, it can be used negatively and destructively.

I’ve always tried to accompany my discussions of knowledge and how one knows things with discussions of meaning, respect for other species, respect for other cultures, respect for scientists, respect for shamans. I try not to put anybody down in my books. It’s true that there have been all kinds of deplorable things done in the shamanic, psychedelic and scientific worlds, but I don’t try to tell people what to do. For one thing, you can’t really because they won’t listen. So, yes, depending on who reads the book and who drinks ayahuasca, all kinds of things can happen, but in the rare instances where people have gone off the deep end after reading my book, I have not felt that the problem came from anything I wrote or suggested. But I’m open to discussion about the subject, if only because I think that words matter, especially my own.  

So, I must believe, if I believe anything, that increased knowledge about the natural world will be for the better…and more research is needed. That’s always the concluding sentence. 

JP: It’s interesting that the marine biologists and their associates working on decoding whale communication using artificial intelligence are very focused on the ethics of it. If we discover a way to communicate effectively with these animals, what is our responsibility? The U.S. and Soviet research decades ago to attempt to use dolphins as weapons and spies reminds us that there’s often a dark side to knowledge, even if it’s about intelligence in nature…Science doesn’t exist in a vacuum; it’s part of a social order rooted in the accumulation of power and wealth by small minorities.

JEREMY: Where I dispute that is that once people start looking at plants and other animals as intelligent beings, I think 98% of them feel greater respect for the world around them. Once you open up to the intelligence of a dolphin or a blade of grass or an ecosystem, I think that most of the time, the understanding that comes from that opening is going to increase tolerance and lead to a better understanding of our place in the biosphere. When you consider how little we know about plants, what motivates them, what their perspectives are, and knowing that the world we live in is this very vegetal world, we have a lot of room for improvement when it comes to acquiring basic knowledge about the world around us. So, I must believe, if I believe anything, that increased knowledge about the natural world will be for the better…and more research is needed. That’s always the concluding sentence.  

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