‘Ayahuasca is changing global environmental consciousness’
David Hill: Interview with US scientist Dennis McKenna on powerful Amazon hallucinogen, plant intelligence and environmental crises
Ayahuasca, as it has come to be known internationally, is a plant medicine that has been used in the Amazon for centuries for healing and spiritual purposes. Renowned for the often extraordinary visions it induces – not to mention the deep vomiting – it is made from an Amazonian vine known to western science as Banisteriopsis caapi and usually at least one other plant.
Over the last 25 years or so ayahuasca has gone global, with many 1000s of people travelling to Peru and other South American countries to drink it, and expert healers – curanderos, shamans, ayahuasqueros, maestros – travelling abroad to hold ceremonies. Many drink ayahuasca because theyre looking for healing, some are just curious, some mistake it for a recreational drug.
One of ayahuascas pioneer scientific researchers is Dennis McKenna, a US ethnopharmacologist and younger brother of the legendary ethnobotanist and author Terence. Some years ago, in an article titled Ayahuasca and Human Destiny published in the Journal of Psychoactive Drugs, McKenna emphasised the contribution ayahuasca can make to physical and spiritual healing – if it is ever afforded its rightful place in medical practice – and addressing potential environmental catastrophe.
[Ayahuasca is] the conduit to a body of profoundly ancient genetic and evolutionary wisdom that has long abided in the cosmologies of the indigenous peoples of the Amazon who have guarded and protected this knowledge for millennia, who learned long ago that the human role is not to be the master of nature, but its stewards, McKenna wrote. Our destiny, if we are to survive, is to nurture nature and to learn from it how to nurture ourselves and our fellow beings. This is the lesson that we can learn from ayahuasca, if only we pay attention.
Below are edited excerpts from an interview between McKenna, in the US, and the Guardian, in Iquitos, a city in Perus Amazon which the scientist calls the epicentre of the global ayahuasca movement:
DM: What can [ayahuasca] do for the environmental movement? I think a lot of people, especially if they come to South America, come away with a really renewed appreciation for our connection to and the importance of nature. I think that ayahuasca is a catalytic influence in changing global environmental consciousness, which is something thats got to happen if were going to get out of the mess were in. The main challenge we have as a species is – getting on the soap-box for a minute – we have forgotten our connection to nature. Weve come to the conclusion that we own nature, it exists for us to exploit, and were busy doing that. Were destroying it in the process. Were destabilising all of these global mechanisms that keep the biosphere habitable by life. I think ayahuasca is waking up a lot of people and reminding them that, No, thats not the way it is. You monkeys are not running the show. The plants are running the show, by sustaining life on earth, if nothing else. There needs to be a global shift of consciousness. People need to understand this before they can really begin to change, and so in that sense I think ayahuasca is an ambassador from the community of species. The message is basically, Wake up, you monkeys! Youre wrecking the place! Its very important and interesting that so many people come away with this strong message that theyve really been moved and touched by something that they feel is an intelligent entity – an intelligent representative of the natural world.