Magic, Money, and Mu(shrooms): On the Psychedelic Industry, Environmental Crisis, and Indigenous Territories

Abstract: As the environmental crisis intensifies humans are searching in many corners of the world for solutions and actions to take on both a political, economic, and social level. In recent years, psychedelics have been brought forward in Western academia as a potential way of (re-)connecting humans with nature and foster pro-environmental behaviour. Using online, semi-structured interviews with researchers and psychedelic users, this thesis departs from this literature and critically engages with the global spread of psychedelics and ideas around them as tools in the environmental crisis that has followed in popular media. Main findings include that psychedelics may be understood as nature-connecting agents on an individual level, which can simultaneously be seen as a potential benefit for the biosphere at large, whilst feeding into an individualisation of environmental responsibility in favour of corporations and capitalism. Further, the global spread of psychedelics has contributed to the emergence of a psychedelic industry and the commodification of psychedelics in the global North, which is impacting Indigenous groups, territories, and ecosystems negatively. By engaging with Human Ecology and Ecopsychology theories, this thesis concludes that understanding psychedelics as a solution to the environmental crisis offers a distorted interpretation of both causes and solutions for said crisis, individualising environmental responsibility and displacing attention from corporations and the overarching political economy of environmental degradation.