Can Tripping Save the Planet?

In 2016, Gail Bradbrook traveled 11,000 miles from her home in Stroud, England—an idyllic town known for its commitment to sustainable agriculture and the arts—to a retreat center in the teeming forest of Costa Rica. There, in the verdant, biodiverse sanctuary, she consumed ayahuasca, an extract used in healing ceremonies that is typically brewed from stalks of the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and leaves of the Psychotria viridis (chacruna) shrub native to the Amazon Basin. She also consumed iboga, a small shrub found in central West Africa, that, for centuries, has been used as medicine and sacrament.

Ayahuasca and iboga are powerful hallucinogens that induce non-ordinary states of consciousness.¹ Bradbrook, a lifelong environmental and animal rights advocate with a Ph.D. in molecular biophysics, had consumed psychedelics in the past. But on this particular trip, she hoped to better understand how she was meant to focus her work. “There was so much I wanted to do that wasn’t quite working,” she told me. Her trip reminded her of some long-held convictions: that we create our own realities and that her purpose was to be in service to life. More importantly, it offered what she describes as the answers to her prayers for “the codes to social change.”

Not everyone comes away from psychedelic use planning to start a transformative environmental movement.

Through a series of synchronicities, her experience. A global, non-partisan environmental movement, Extinction Rebellion stages dramatic nonviolent acts of protest and civil disobedience to demand corporate and government action in response to climate change and ecological breakdown. The movement is not without its share of , but has inspired unprecedented , as well as from s and banks that bear some responsibility for fueling the climate crisis. Psychedelics, Bradbrook says, “helped me get out of my own way. I was praying for guides and for guidance.” The trip became the “starting point for the birth of the movement,” she said.