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The Environment Forum & Psychedelics in Society and Culture
Speaker: Gary Nabhan
This event is open to Harvard affiliates only and registration is required.
About the Event
Like all plants on the planet, sacred and ceremonial plants used by faith-based and Indigenous cultures are at risk due to climate change, land development, and warfare. And yet, sacred plants—including sources of psychedelic substances used in ceremonial healing—are also being endangered by overharvesting by recreational users, cartels, and those naively engaged in cultural appropriation. Such issues cannot be solved simply by establishing new legal regulations or by biological conservation and ecological restoration; solutions will require the engagement of humanities scholars in ethics, religion, folklife studies, and cultural history. The talk will highlight examples of disrupted access or accelerated biological extirpation of sacred or psychotropic plant and animal populations, but will also showcase viable solutions from Lebanon, Morocco, the US Southwest, and Mexico. In particular, Gary Nabhan will discuss collaborative interfaith and intertribal efforts to designate the giant saguaro cacti as a legally-protected, sacred, and sentient being through tribal resolutions and court cases that affirm Indigenous access to sacred and ceremonial plants as a part of Constitutionally-guaranteed religious freedoms. Efforts to safeguard sacred plants in their biocultural habitats can help bridge the gap between the "two cultures" of science and religion that are currently dividing American society by bringing together faith-based and science-based communities for common causes: protecting, regenerating, honoring, and celebrating the sacredness of nature through values shared by many cultures. The week of Earth Day, Nabhan will be launching a new endeavor called the Sacred Plants Biocultural Recovery Initiative as a new paradigm in collaborative cross-cultural conservation.
About the Speaker
A staffer at the first Earth Day HQ, Gary Paul Nabhan is an Ecumenical Franciscan Brother, contemplative ecologist, conservation biologist, and restoration botanist who has worked with and for Indigenous and other place-based traditional communities on four continents. For such work, he has been honored with a MacArthur "genius" Fellowship, a Pew Foundation Fellowship in Conservation and Environment, a Lannan Literary Award, and a listing by Utne Reader as one of thirty innovators making the world a better place in which to live. He has served on the National Parks System Advisory Board under two presidents and helped obtain designations for new protected areas for biocultural landscapes in the U.S. and Mexico that cover hundreds of thousands of acres. An Arab-American, he has done field work in the remaining groves of the Cedars of Lebanon, in protected "hima" areas for church forests, mosque forests, and sacred springs gathering grounds in Egypt, Lebanon, Morocco, and Oman. As an Endowed Chair Emeritus at the University of Arizona, he is focusing his field research on restoring sacred sites and recovering ceremonial plants to marry the ecological sciences and faith-based traditions in the face of climate change. His writing and fieldwork have been featured in the New York Times, National Public Radio Science Friday, Los Angeles Times, Guardian, National Catholic Reporter, and Smithsonian. His new multicultural alliance, the Sacred Plants Biocultural Recovery Initiative, is bringing together humanities scholars, spiritual leaders, Indigenous ceremonial activists, and biocultural restorationists for positive actions using traditional ecological knowledge, interaction ecology, and ceremony to change the dialogue between scientists and faith-based proponents of "caring for creation." Read more about him and the new initiative at www.garynabhan.com.
About the Series
The Environment Forum is dedicated to exploring new work in the arts and humanities that reframes or reimagines the relationship of humanity to the rest of nature.
The Study of Psychedelics in Society and Culture seeks to transform the psychedelics research landscape by producing cutting-edge scholarship and convening faculty, students, and experts to engage in discussion around their far-reaching implications.