An ecological
account of
psychedelics
How psychedelics may open the mind to the living systems it already belongs to, and what that could mean for healing people and the planet.
Most of us know we are part of nature. Few of us feel it.
The planetary health crisis is multifaceted, from ravaged ecosystems and vanishing species to declining mental health and a loss of shared meaning. Running through all of them is a rupture in relations between humans and the rest of life. Ecopsychology linked ecological breakdown and rising psychological distress decades ago (Roszak et al., 1995), and they are now increasingly read as one entangled pattern, the metacrisis (Everth, 2025).
Part of the crisis is a weakened capacity to perceive our relationships with the living world, what Capra called a “crisis of perception” (1996). We can understand our dependence on nature and still not feel it, or act on it.
The roots are ontological, in the basic assumptions through which human experience is organized. Modern life tends to treat selves and objects as separate units whose relations come second. Relational traditions — from Whitehead’s process philosophy to Buddhist teachings on dependent origination and many Indigenous traditions — see things arising through their relations (Garfield, 2015; Kimmerer, 2013). Experiences that make interdependence vivid fit the relational, ecological or systems view of life.
- The metacrisis
- The entanglement and mutual amplification of ecological, social, economic, political and existential breakdowns. Everth, 2025
- Crisis of perception
- A mismatch between mechanistic worldviews and the relational patterns that sustain life. Capra, 1996
- Meaning crisis
- A widespread erosion of the shared frameworks through which industrial societies make sense of life. Vervaeke, 2019
- Extinction of experience
- Connection to nature declining across generations. Richardson, 2025
- Mother Earth-level determinants of health
- In Indigenous terms, Earth is a living, sentient relative with inherent rights, and the rupture with her disrupts health. Redvers et al., 2022
Distinct accounts from different fields and knowledge systems. The thesis reads them as pointing the same way, each from its own ground: a breakdown in how humans perceive and take part in the systems that sustain life.
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A split in nature.
Whitehead called it the bifurcation of nature: nature as science measures it, set against nature as we live it, full of qualities and meaning. To him the split was the error, since the sunset we see is part of nature as much as the photons science describes. Descartes gave it its modern form, mind against matter.
Whitehead, 1920 -
A species apart.
Human exceptionalism makes people a different kind of being. Agency, meaning and subjectivity become uniquely human, and the rest of the living world turns passive or mechanical. The effects are perceptual as much as conceptual: everyday life dulls our sense of being embedded in a web of relations.
Haraway, 2008 -
Senses out of practice.
Modern life trains attention on objects, tools and other people. Skills for reading the living world, built over millennia, can fade through disuse while its signs are still all around us. The narrowing has a history in land dislocation, enclosure and markets that stripped the more-than-human world of agency and standing.
Plumwood, 2002; Whyte, 2018 -
A crisis of identity.
Redvers and colleagues describe a “fragmented and dissociated identity” that creates the psychological distance needed to harm the environment. A self defined apart from the systems that sustain it may count their destruction as an environmental externality rather than as self-destruction.
Redvers et al., 2022
Our minds have always been part of the living systems around and within us. Modern life has shut most of them out, and for a few hours, psychedelics can let them back in.
By living systems we mean the beings and places around a person, and their own body, which has a biological history of its own. Psychedelics are coming back at a time when most people know the living world is in trouble but rarely feel it. A psychedelic experience won’t change what is driving that trouble. It can, however, let someone feel what they already know, and learning when that happens, in a person and in a culture, may help ecological responsibility take root.
If the self is expanded to include the natural world, behaviour leading to destruction of the world will be experienced as self-destruction.
Do psychedelics open human cognition onto the living systems of which it is already a part?
Two further questions follow. How do psychedelic experiences reorganize the coupling between a person and their surroundings, and under what conditions do ecological relations become perceptually and motivationally salient as a result? And under what cultural conditions does the opening settle into lasting ecological attunement, and does that attunement return to the ecological systems in which these compounds originate?
Belleau, The Psygaia Hypothesis: Psychedelic Experience & Ecological Cognition, §1.1, in brief
Psychedelics loosen the brain’s most entrenched expectations, and the experience then organizes around whatever the person is engaged with.
The deeper the boundary dissolution, the more tightly brain activity follows its context (Stoliker et al., 2026). Those contexts were rest, meditation, music and film, all inside a laboratory.
Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019Whether an outdoor, living setting shapes the experience differently from an indoor clinic or room, and whether that difference lasts in how a person relates to the world afterwards.
No study has yet taken that measure into a forest. A fair test would give the same dose, or an active placebo, in a forest, a clinic and a plain room. In the forest, the placebo works like forest bathing.
Li, 2022Even with eyeshades on and music playing, a person still hears, feels their own body and senses the room, so the setting never switches off.
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Through the surroundings
Where living surroundings reach the senses, living relations come forward through them: birdsong, wind, the smell of soil, the trees in view. The place itself can come to feel alive and responsive. A setting can be rich in life with little to see: in mestizo vegetalismo, ayahuasca sessions run after dark, in open-sided structures where the forest is heard, smelled and felt more than seen. Irvine et al., 2023; Luna, 1986
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Through the body’s history
Under eyeshades, living relations come forward through the body itself. A body is built by evolution, shaped by where it has lived and run on compounds other organisms made, so it carries the places and living things it has known: something like Roszak’s ecological unconscious. That is why the opening can still be felt with the eyes closed, and why what comes forward there should depend on how much of their life a person has spent with nature. Roszak, 1992
So boundary dissolution should appear in any setting. The sense of aliveness, interdependence and embeddedness should be strongest outdoors, weakest in a plain indoor room, and in between under eyeshades. Indoors, how strongly it comes forward should depend on how much of their life a person has spent with nature; outdoors it should come forward regardless. In nature, and only there, the more closely brain activity followed the setting during the session, the more a person’s relationship with nature should have changed months later.
Three scales.
One coherent account.
Each scale adds something the others cannot, and together they carry two claims: one about what a psychedelic does to a mind, and a weaker one, that the change can last, and what people then do can reach back to the plants and fungi the molecules come from.
Earth as a self-organizing system.
The world is an interconnected web, and each of us is a strand woven into it.
At the macro scale, systems theory and Gaia theory frame Earth as a complex, self-regulating network maintained through distributed feedback processes across biological and geochemical domains. Human cognition is positioned not as an observer standing outside this system, but as one process embedded within it — shaped by, and shaping, the same regulatory dynamics that sustain life at planetary scale.
The hypothesis employs Gaia theory in its weak, cybernetic formulation (Capra & Luisi, 2014; Lovelock & Margulis, 1974): as an Earth-system model describing regulatory dynamics without invoking planetary consciousness or purpose. The disconnection crisis, within this framing, is a breakdown in a node’s integration with the network processes that sustain it.
Mind as coupling of organism and environment.
A mind is made in the back-and-forth between a body and what is around it.
The meso level is anchored in the enactive theory of Varela, Thompson and Rosch. Against representationalist models that locate cognition inside the brain, enactivism holds that cognition is the active bringing-forth of a meaningful world through embodied, sensorimotor interaction — not the passive reception of pre-given data. Psychedelic experience, from this vantage point, is therefore not a departure from a stable, baseline reality.
Psychedelics loosen the ego-centred structures through which a world is enacted, reconfiguring how organism and environment couple. REBUS (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019) sits within this account. On this view, neural activity and lived experience co-emerge, each determining the other rather than forming a linear chain of cause and effect (Meling & Scheidegger, 2023).
Psychedelics as semiotic modulators.
A molecule means something only to a body that can read it as a sign.
Biosemiotics holds that semiosis, the production and interpretation of meaningful signs, is not a uniquely human achievement but a foundational property of living systems. Cells respond to molecular cues; plants detect airborne compounds from stressed neighbours; mycorrhizal networks have been reported to mediate chemical signals. Meaning arises through the receiver’s interpretive response, not through content inherent in the molecule.
Psychedelics can be understood as biosemiotic modulators: they initiate a cascading reorganization of the organism’s semiotic scaffolding. The habitual ego-centred self-world boundary loosens and the range of environmental features registering as meaningful signs expands. Here, the molecule is a key, not a message. The information that emerges belongs to the coupling itself.
Many people come back feeling part of nature.
These words come from an online survey answered by people who chose to take part, so they show what the experience can be like, not how often it happens.
There is actually no real separation between humanity and the natural world.
I could communicate with trees.
Harming nature would be like hurting myself.
Survey participants, Irvine et al., 2023
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The change can last.
In a survey that followed people over time, connection to nature (“nature-relatedness”) rose slightly after a psychedelic experience and was still higher among those who answered again two years later.
Kettner et al., 2019 -
Seen in clinical research too.
In a small open-label trial, patients given psilocybin for treatment-resistant depression came away feeling a little more connected to nature.
Lyons & Carhart-Harris, 2018 -
It went with greener habits.
In a cross-sectional survey, lifetime psychedelic use went with greater connection to nature, and that connection went with more self-reported pro-environmental behaviour.
Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2017 -
Natural settings may amplify it.
Natural settings appear to amplify the rise in connection to nature and to prolong it. At festivals, surrounded by people, what rises is connection to other people (Forstmann et al., 2020), which fits the idea that the drug loosens and the setting shapes what a person takes in.
Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2025; Kettner et al., 2019; Weiss et al., 2023
Read it for what it is: most of these studies are correlational and rely on self-report. What they can and cannot show →
Psyche was never
separate from Gaia.
The hypothesis names the synthesis of three scales — systems and Gaia theory at the macro level, enactive cognition at the meso, biosemiotics at the micro. Together they describe Earth as a self-organizing system, cognition as organism-environment coupling, and meaning as something organisms actively interpret rather than passively receive.
Their shared claim is simple: psychedelics open human cognition onto the living systems of which it is already a part. Cognition is ecological to begin with, and psychedelics relax what normally keeps most of its living relations in the background. As ego-centred perception loosens, a wider range of signals becomes salient, the setting weighs more heavily on what is made of them, and identity moves from ego-centric to eco-centric — what Næss called the ecological self.
Boundary dissolution, a heightened sense of aliveness, insights into interdependence — these common phenomenological motifs become intelligible as moments when the relational systems that constitute the human organism grow vivid. What the language of “connection” or “unity” reaches for is not a metaphysical claim but a perceptual one — the relational processes that constitute the self, briefly brought into view. It is through these recurring structures that the account reads psychedelic experience: as the reorganization of a cognitive system that is fundamentally ecological, in which the interdependence of living systems becomes perceptually and motivationally salient.
From disconnection to attunement.
Ecological attunement is the degree to which living relations shape a person’s perception, attention and action in everyday life. Those relations include other people as well as the rest of the living world: connection to nature and connection to others tend to rise together (Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2025).
It is a capacity everyone has, because every mind is already part of living systems, and it is built through practice, ritual and long acquaintance with particular places and communities. Many traditions are practices of attunement in their own right. A psychedelic experience can be one occasion for it. Making it last takes repetition, and other paths reach it too (Jordan & Hinds, 2016; Richter & Hunecke, 2022).
Beauty is often where it begins. Attending to a place for its own sake, to its light, sound and pattern, takes seriously the qualities the split in nature set aside as merely subjective. Psychedelic use has been linked with this kind of aesthetic wonder (Kirkham & Letheby, 2022). Attunement takes in grief as well: the openness that finds a forest beautiful can also feel what is being done to it.
- The narrowing
- Modern life organizes attention around objects, tools and other people, and leaves most living relations in the background. Over generations, the skill of reading them fades.
- The opening
- For a few hours, psychedelics loosen what holds that narrowing in place, and living relations weigh more on what a person perceives, feels and finds significant.
- Attunement
- The opening carried into everyday life: relations that are felt and acted on, and kept alive by practice, community and place. Other paths lead here too.
The thesis argues for the narrowing and the opening. Attunement is where they lead, and it is the part with the least evidence so far. Most studies simply ask people how connected to nature they feel, and don’t follow them for long. Hardly any have checked whether people actually live differently.
Boundary dissolution belongs to the opening itself, and it passes. Three other qualities recur in what people describe, and in attunement they last into ordinary days.
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Aliveness
Trees, rivers, soil and weather seem vividly alive and responsive, even aware, where ordinary perception treats them as background. People often come away caring for the places where they felt it, as if they had met those places as subjects.
Irvine et al., 2023 -
Interdependence
The sense that lives, human and otherwise, depend on one another, and that one’s actions ripple outward. People describe it as felt more than understood, often arriving with awe, grief or gratitude, and with a new sense of responsibility.
Irvine et al., 2023 -
Embeddedness
Belonging, felt from the inside: one’s own life as part of the living world, with no outside to stand in. Researchers now set it apart from connectedness, which links separate things: embeddedness is feeling continuous with one’s surroundings.
Stoliker et al., 2026
Does cognition extend beyond the organism?
If cognition is ecological, the account reaches past the individual mind: to whole ecosystems, and to the long relationship between people and the plants and fungi these molecules come from. The thesis marks these ideas as exploratory. Each follows from the account and reaches further than its evidence does.
- Ecological cognition
Does cognition reach the whole ecosystem?
The hypothesis starts from ecological cognition: perceiving, feeling, thinking and acting all arise between a body and its surroundings. Followed further, that view points toward mind in the living system itself, what Bateson called mind “immanent in the large biological system”, with no conscious agent behind it. On that reading a forest is a cognitive system in its own right, and a psychedelic experience might sharpen a person’s sensitivity to it. The thesis explores this as where the hypothesis points, without yet claiming it.
Bateson, 1972 - Cognitive symbiosis
Is the relationship mutual?
These molecules almost certainly evolved for reasons unrelated to people (Wink, 2003). Once people began eating them, a loop became possible: a fungus changes how a species perceives and thinks, and that species then grows the fungus and trades it. Over long spans of time, repeated cycles of use, cultivation and cognitive change could benefit both, by analogy with Margulis’s symbiogenesis, with no one coordinating it. They can also cost one party, as the pressure on wild peyote already shows.
Margulis, 2001
For the relationship to be mutual, a loop would have to close in four steps. The thesis tests each one on its own, and the evidence thins out as the loop goes on.
- Evidence: strongest
Perception loosens
Measured in brain activity and in what people report, though so far only in laboratories.
Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019; Stoliker et al., 2026 - Evidence: mostly correlational
Nature comes closer
Connection to nature rises after an experience, in surveys that can rarely show cause.
Forstmann & Sagioglou, 2017; Kettner et al., 2019 - Evidence: the weakest link
What people do changes
Mystical experiences go with greener habits, but nearly all of it rests on what people say they do.
Paterniti et al., 2022 - Evidence: runs both ways
Back to the source
People grow and trade these species, and demand also strips them, as with wild peyote.
Ermakova & Gandy, 2025
The last step exists only where compounds are gathered, grown or traded, since a synthetic molecule has no source to return to. Could the loop help regulate the Earth, as Gaia’s feedbacks do? Some part of it would have to respond when ecosystems decline, and none has been found. Psychedelics are returning during an ecological crisis, but timing alone shows no such part.
If the experience is relational, the practice has to be too.
A therapy room is a setting too, one someone chose. Whether what a person felt becomes a way of living depends on the people, stories and places around them afterwards; without those, it is left to chance. And where the mushrooms or cactus came from is a matter of ethics as much as supply.
- Ecological medicine
Health is relational.
Many Indigenous and traditional medicines hold health to be balance within relations. Ecological medicine reaches a related view, which it calls planetary health: people flourish only as the living systems around them do (Prescott, 2024).
- Ethics of attention
What you attend to shapes what settles.
Psychedelics loosen entrenched patterns of perception for a while. What people keep paying attention to in the days and weeks after helps decide which new patterns take hold, so integration needs care about where attention goes.
- Convergent practices
Meditation, breathwork and place.
Meditation, breathwork and time in a particular place all change how we relate to our surroundings, from the inside. They partly overlap with psychedelic states without sharing a single mechanism, and they can be practised every day.
- Relational traditions
Learn without taking.
Mazatec, Shipibo-Conibo and Huichol traditions are living knowledge systems with their own authority, inseparable from Indigenous sovereignty (Celidwen et al., 2023). Their ritual, reciprocity with place and shared interpretation can carry an experience into obligation.
- Meaning & narrative repair
New stories, held carefully.
Psychedelics can loosen inherited stories and let new ones form. If the only story on offer is personal healing, insight is absorbed into it; traditions that tell it as responsibility to places and beings can carry it outward. Integration must also sort insight from grandiosity.
- Ecological ethics
Beyond personal change.
A psychedelic industry run on market logic risks reproducing the disconnection it claims to treat. Responsibility means facing settler colonialism (Whyte, 2018) and caring for the fungi and cacti these medicines come from (Ermakova & Gandy, 2025).
Psychedelic therapy mostly runs inside biomedicine, which counts success as fewer symptoms in one person. Albert (2019) calls this an “ego-centric reality principle”: health judged by how well someone adapts to the life around them, without asking whether that life is part of what made them unwell. A clinic built this way can screen out the relational and ecological insight people bring back.
Ecological medicine reads the same results differently (Makhinson et al., 2026). Researchers keep finding connectedness at the centre of what heals (Watts et al., 2017). If disconnection is part of what makes people unwell, symptom relief may be a sign that someone has begun to take part in their relationships differently. That is why the thesis favours therapy built around connection rather than pathology.
Community surveys follow what comes after an experience: people report wellbeing, spirituality and connection to nature before it, after it and again later, which can show whether the connection lasts. Testing whether the setting shapes the experience would take a different study, one that gives the same dose in different settings. Our anonymous survey asks about all three and takes about five minutes.
Take the survey →What does this experience ask of me, as part of the larger community of life?
Psychedelics can prompt that question. Answering it takes practice, culture and ethical commitment.
The Great Turning is a name for the essential adventure of our time: the shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a life-sustaining civilization.
Questions the thesis leaves open.
Two more ideas the thesis marks as exploratory. Each follows from the hypothesis and goes further than its evidence does.
- Ritual absence
Does modern life lack rituals that loosen the self?
Many societies have kept practices that loosen the ego-centred self and turn people back toward wider relations: rites of passage, vision quests, fasting, long stays in wild places. Industrial societies have few that compare, and the loss may help keep ego-centred, instrumental ways of perceiving in place. Psychedelic experiences can be read as fragments of that old recalibration, often private and weakly integrated. Where nothing carries them into practice, whether an opening settles into lasting attunement, and attunement into conduct, is left to chance.
Turner, 1972 - Beyond the nervous system
Does the loosening reach beyond the brain?
The main receptor these molecules act on, the serotonin receptor 5-HT2A, is found in the gut, the immune system and the blood vessels as well as the cortex (Nichols, 2016). Varela treated the immune system as a cognitive network, one that keeps the body itself coherent without central control. Read that way, anti-inflammatory effects reported in cellular and animal models (Flanagan & Nichols, 2018) could be the same loosening at another level. Whether loosening is even the right word for what happens in those tissues is an open question.
Varela & Coutinho, 1991
What the hypothesis does not claim.
Claims that psychedelics will save the world are inflated. The intuition behind them is sound: self-centred ways of living do collective harm, and psychedelics can loosen those ways for a few hours. These limits apply to everything on this page.
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Not a finished proof.
That cognition happens between a body and its surroundings is a premise, and that psychedelics loosen what holds it in place is measured, so far only in laboratories. That the loosening lets living relations shape experience more strongly is the hypothesis, and it would be weakened if aliveness, interdependence and embeddedness stood out no more where living surroundings reach the senses.
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Not settled evidence.
Most studies are correlational, rely on self-report and are hard to blind, since people know what they took and what their culture says it does.
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Not automatic.
Psychedelics tend toward relation without guaranteeing it, and they can reinforce the worldview around them, including right-wing and transhumanist ones (Pace & Devenot, 2021).
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Not unique to psychedelics.
Meditation and time in nature are linked with greater connection to nature too (Jordan & Hinds, 2016; Richter & Hunecke, 2022).
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Not shown to change what people do.
Nearly all the evidence so far is what people say they do, and attitudes often fail to become action (Kollmuss & Agyeman, 2002).
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Not a solution to the crisis.
Wider use would not by itself improve ecological outcomes, and rising demand can deplete the cacti and fungi these compounds come from. A private feeling of connection can also stand in for political and social engagement.
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Not the last word on what these experiences are.
The naturalistic reading is one among others. Its stance is an ethics of non-closure, answerable to the Indigenous lineages and territories these molecules come from (Redvers et al., 2022).
Who this work draws on.
Cognitive science, biology, ecological philosophy, anthropology, psychedelic neuroscience and Indigenous-led scholarship all shape the hypothesis.
Varela, Thompson & Rosch
Enactive Cognition
The Embodied Mind
Fritjof Capra
Systems Theory
The Web of Life
Lynn Margulis
Evolutionary Biology
Symbiogenesis
Gregory Bateson
Ecology of Mind
Steps to an Ecology of Mind
Jesper Hoffmeyer
Biosemiotics
Semiotic scaffolding
Robin Carhart-Harris
Psychedelic Neuroscience
REBUS model
John Vervaeke
Cognitive Science
The meaning crisis
Alfred North Whitehead
Process Philosophy
The bifurcation of nature
David Abram
Ecological Philosophy
The Spell of the Sensuous
Val Plumwood
Ecofeminist Philosophy
Environmental Culture
Robin Wall Kimmerer
Indigenous Science & Botany
Braiding Sweetgrass
Luis Eduardo Luna
Anthropology
Vegetalismo
Nicole Redvers
Indigenous Planetary Health
Mother Earth-level determinants
Joanna Macy
Deep Ecology & Systems Thinking
The Work That Reconnects
Glen Albrecht
Environmental Philosophy
The Symbiocene
Arne Næss
Deep Ecology
The ecological self
Theodore Roszak
Ecopsychology
Ecopsychology (1995)
Bill Plotkin
Ecopsychology
Eco-awakening
Yuria Celidwen
Indigenous Ethics
Ethical principles of traditional Indigenous medicine
Kyle Whyte
Indigenous Studies & Environmental Justice
Settler colonialism and environmental injustice
Research that becomes practice.
This hypothesis is the thinking behind our program, guidance and community.
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