Andy Letcher: Cultivating reciprocity with animistic views of relationality (ep369)

Written By kamea chayne
“An animistic worldview is one I think that is deeply embedded in relationality, exactly the kind we need at this moment of crisis. So far from it being a ‘primitive’ thing, I think actually it can show us ways forward about how to be in the world, and how to be in the world with gratitude, knowledge, reciprocity.”
— ANDY LETCHER

In this episode, we welcome Dr. Andy Letcher, a Senior Lecturer at Schumacher College, Devon UK, where he runs the MA Engaged Ecology. He is the author of Shroom: A Cultural History of the Magic Mushroom and numerous papers and chapters about the nature of contemporary psychedelic experience.

Some of the topics we explore in this conversation include different interpretations of ecology and how they influence our approaches to caring for the planet, how the animistic worldview offers guidance for our paths towards relational healing, what it means to root personal engagements with psychedelic medicines within deeper cultural changes, and more.

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Transcript:

Note: Our episodes are minimally edited. Please view them as open invitations to dive deeper into each resource and topic explored. This transcript has been edited for brevity and clarity.

Kamea Chayne: You've shared before that the idea of the self, referring to the dominant, contemporary sense of this individualistic, isolated self, “underpins neoliberal late capitalism, and it’s not a very ecological view of the self.” Can you expand more on these different forms of the self that you've named, and how exactly this atomistic worldview of the self sets the stage for and perpetuates the dominant economic and political systems of today?

Andy Letcher: Here, I'm very much drawing on the thoughts of the Australian environmental philosopher Freya Mathews, who wrote extensively about this in her book The Ecological Self. In her analysis, the Western conception of the self is that we are individuals. The fundamental unit, if you like, is the individual, and the self is singular and it's atomistic. The image that people like to use is of the billiard ball, the pupil, that we just bounce around making rational consumer choices, trying to find connection with other people. But really, there's just a singular “I” here, and that's all there is.

Famously in Britain, late in the 1980s, the then-conservative prime minister Margaret Thatcher, said there is no such thing as society, by which she meant we are just individuals. It's easy to see why this is not a particularly ecological view of the self. We're isolated from each other and the world, and we just exist in this almost solipsistic world. I'm not alone in questioning this view of the self and seeing it as fundamentally problematic.

I wondered whether there are other views of the self that might afford a more ecological view or allow us to be more ecologically minded.

We can challenge [this view of the self] on two fronts: on whether there really is a singular "I" and [whether that "I" is] surrounded by a hard, impermeable boundary.

It might seem a bit strange to challenge whether there's a singular I. But Jung famously did that and said there were all sorts of aspects of the psyche, both conscious and unconscious, that need to be brought into conscious attention. We are, in fact, multiple.

It's something we experience on a daily basis. Someone might present me with a large slice of Banoffee pie, and some part of me goes, “Yes, I really want to eat that. I want the satisfaction of sugar and fat and the pleasure of eating this pie.” But another part of me is going, “Yes, but if I do that, I'll put on weight too. This is not a healthy meal,” or whatever. We're very used to having multiple selves, and multiple selves that don't always agree.

Then we can question whether we have this impermeable boundary around the self. If you look at certain Indigenous cultures, they would say that that's simply not the case. I'm very influenced by the teachings of a Southern African diviner, sangoma Colin Campbell, who says the whole point of all the rituals that Indigenous people go through—the vigils, the austerities, the dancing—is to render the self permeable, to open ourselves to the other, to the non-human. It's something that we need to work on and develop. In this model of the self, we're multiple and permeable and porous, and we can let the world in. Now, that's a very different model of the self to the Western one.

Were we to cultivate a permeable model of the self, it would open us to the non-human world in ways that are inherently ecological.

Let me just give you one practical example of that. This is a story that comes from a colleague and a teacher, Robin Bowman, who's an expert [in] wilderness connection. He has a profound understanding of what's going on in the non-human world. He was in southern Africa, among the San Bushmen, and they were just sitting there preparing food. Suddenly, there was an almighty commotion going on. All the birds started setting off alarm calls and the women he was with carried on their conversations and didn't really pay any attention to what was going on. Well, he went out to try and find out what was causing all the commotion among the birds. It turns out it was a snake.

From the alarm call, the women, a) knew that it was a snake and b) knew that it wasn't a snake that was putting them or their children or their village in any danger. So, there is a level of permeability to the non-human world that we in the West have completely lost. If any of us notice birdcalls or birdsong, that's a miracle in itself. But to know, “Ah, yes, that bird call means that particular snake.” There's a level of knowledge that we've lost, we've forgotten. So that's really just a practical example of how we can actually develop a permeable self, and the practical ecological utility of it.

Kamea Chayne: You've made a remark that "we’ve got the right philosophy, we’ve sorted that in a way, it still comes down to political change, structural change, economic change—and politicians having the political will to do it.”

When we talk about how these deeper worldview shifts might guide us towards collective healing, I wonder if this view also then questions whether incremental changes within our existing political frameworks and economic systems based on a narrower and more bounded view of the self are enough to address things like the climate crisis and sixth mass extinction, if they aren't accompanied by deeper transformations that go beyond what we might be able to see or even measure quantitatively and crucially. Not that people should wait around for politicians, but do our political leaders just need the will, or also some deeper transformations themselves to reorient their values and ideas of progress?

Andy Letcher: That is the $64 million question right there, because we're not short on science. There's this staggering statistic that half of the carbon dioxide we've released into the atmosphere ever in human existence has occurred since Al Gore's Inconvenient Truth came out in the nineties. So it's not like we didn't know. We don't need more science. We don't need more evidence.

What would it take to persuade politicians to make this change? It would be great if anyone knows the answer to that. There's just such an inertia in the capitalist system that makes it incredibly resistant to change. It's obvious that we need change at that large structural level and the changes we need have to occur at that level. But at this moment, politicians don't feel like they have the mandate to do that. I'm naively hoping that at some point someone will take the initiative and lead the people. But that doesn't seem to be on the agenda any time soon.

So, in the meantime, what can the people do? Well, we can change ourselves. Different people have different amounts of leverage.

What all of us can do is work on ourselves, to change our relationship with the non-human. Cumulatively, it may not avert the climate crisis or mass extinction, but it might create enough of a political will to make the big structural changes that we need.

It feels like something that we can all actively do. To change our relationship with each other, to change our relationship with the non-human, to give it more attention, and open ourselves.

Kamea Chayne: I certainly don't have the answers either, but something I'm stuck on is this thought that those who've acquired the most capital and political power tend to be the ones who do not hold values and worldviews of interconnectedness; and those who do deeply embody values of interconnectedness, who I think are in much healthier relationships with community and the planet to guide us towards collective healing, are the ones who are not even interested in working towards maximizing personal profit at all costs or acquiring that oppressive power and control.

Andy Letcher: I think you're right.

One never wants to universalize the Indigenous or romanticize the Indigenous, because that term covers a huge diversity of peoples living in a huge diversity of ways. But it is undoubtedly the case that Indigenous peoples do preserve other ways of knowing that aren’t recognized, as you say, in the West. What’s recognized in the West is abstraction, either abstraction philosophically or abstraction mathematically. So whatever is going on isn't really what's going on. The explanation lies behind the surfaces, with perhaps a mathematical equation or a theory that can't actually be beheld.

All our knowledge systems, in a sense, withdraw from the world as we apprehend it, as we experience it. So this knowledge system is what's gotten us into the mess, but it's also the knowledge system that’s allowing us to see the extent of the mess we're in.

I was a scientist. I trained as a scientist. I was an ecologist. I still see great value in science, and I wouldn't want to get rid of it entirely. But…

I'm very clear that we need to put boundaries around the knowledge that science can generate, and accept that there may be other forms of knowledge that are equally valid that don't involve abstraction, but that involve a deep knowing through being in the world, through experiencing the world.

The example of the snake I gave earlier—it sounds like a trivial example, but imagine you're walking through the world and you simply know what's going on around you because of all the information that's coming at you from the birds, the insects, and the weather. That's a very different kind of knowledge from looking at an app to tell you what's happening in the world.

Kamea Chayne: Speaking of these transformations we need that go beyond what we can measure, you talk about three forms of ecology that I think would be helpful for us to elaborate on here—namely the biological focus, the socio-ecological movement, and the deeper and more spiritual aspect. Could you walk us through these three ways of looking at ecology, ending with how you might understand ecology as spirituality, rather than them being separate?

Andy Letcher: I was thinking about how the term ecology is used in practice. There are three broad ways in which it tends to be used in contemporary culture. The first is its original meaning. It was invented by the German zoologist Ernst Haeckel in the mid-19th century to mean ecology: the science, the study of organisms, and the way they relate to each other and to the abiotic environment. If you do a keyword search in Google, that's what the Internet tends to think ecology is. It's a science, it's a branch of biology, and it's trying to understand how living things all fit together. But there are two other related ways in which the term is used.

The second is that it's got something to do with social and political change between humans, the way humans structured themselves and the non-human world, the environment, and nature. Call it what you will. We have terms like ecocide or eco-warrior or ecofeminism. In fact, it used to be called the ecology movement—the Green Movement used to be called the ecology movement. So here we're talking about political change vis a vis the environment, things like the Deep Ecology movement or Extinction Rebellion. So, this is about political and social change.

But then there's a third meaning which is commonly articulated, which is that ecology has something to do with spirituality. Problematic word, but something to do with meaning that if ecology teaches us anything, it's that the world is fundamentally interconnected and that there is a meaning for us in that interconnection, that there is a spiritual meaning to our being in the world, to that very interconnectedness.

People use these three terms interchangeably sometimes. Sometimes people who are talking about the interconnectedness of the world in a spiritual sense will invoke the science of ecology. People who are looking for political change always invoke the science of ecology. The science of ecology can be quite ambivalent about or even hostile to spiritual meanings. But there are these three meanings at play in contemporary culture.

I'm interested in all three. As a child and as a teenager I had experiences that I found to be profoundly meaningful, and they had something to do with my sense of belonging in the world, my belonging, my connectedness to the buzzards, to the trees, to the river, the estuary, to the seasons. That became a spur for me to become, ultimately, an environmental activist.

Kamea Chayne: You shared before: “Scientific ecology is concerned with quantity, with measurement, but what it does is it turns the world into complicated sets of measurements, and outputs those measurements as equations, diagrams, graphs, whereas what we’re talking about here in this third definition of ecology is more about quality. It’s no longer a measurement, it’s about a quality of interconnectedness and our finding a place within that interconnected world.”

Whenever we talk about climate change in mainstream discourses, there's always this heavy narrative around believing science and looking to climate scientists as the most and perhaps only credible experts on what we need to do to heal our planet's distress and imbalances. I say this delicately and definitely more so as an invitation to have a “yes, and” mindset rather than an either-or mindset…

But given the third definition of ecology being more about quality and relationality and embodying that permeable sense of the self, I wonder if we'd be, or if we have been, doing ourselves a disservice by propping up climate science as the one knowledge base to use to inform our path to addressing the crisis; and just more broadly, what this lens might lead us to miss out on.

Andy Letcher:

The thing that has traction in the Western world is science, and therefore we need science.

Science can show us, for example, the hockey stick graph of how carbon dioxide levels in the atmosphere have risen steadily, and they can demonstrate that that's a result of human activity. I think that's incredibly useful and incredibly powerful. But as we've already touched on, there are these other ways of knowing. So, for example, we've had weird weather. What I'm experiencing at the moment here in England is a very normal English summer. It's a bit wet, it's a bit cloudy, it's going to be a bit rubbish, but that's not uncommon.

But sometimes we've had an Indian summer whereby I'm sitting in the middle of November in a t-shirt and shorts and it's basically hot during the day. I don't need science to tell me that that's an aberration. I can feel its weirdness because I know what the weather ought to feel like, and in November it ought to be cold and miserable and wet [with] winter coming in. I shouldn't be sitting around in a t-shirt and shorts putting on sun cream.

If our concern is about creating change in the world, then I think we need both in terms of political change. But if we're talking about healing, then I think these other modalities of knowing are the ways forward.

Here's where we need to hone our senses and hone these other ways of knowing by rendering ourselves pervious and permeable to the world, and understanding the quality of the weather. The weather has a quality. We talk about being under the weather, but what would happen if we just every morning, the first thing we do when we open the door and greet the day is just to pay attention to the quality of the weather?

What's it feel like? Does it feel normal? Does it feel unusual? Is it going to rain today? Is it going to be sunny? Is it going to be hot? Is it going to be a frost? What does my body tell me now? That would be a different way of knowing about the weather. Do I need to pack a raincoat? So before, I reach for my app to tell me whether to take an umbrella, what does my body tell me? Can I know the weather in that way

I think that is a way to profoundly heal our relationship with the world, because now we're engaged with the world, we're paying attention to it. We can know it in a different way.

Kamea Chayne: I do feel like it's really important to consider how we frame and conceptualize the problems that we have because that affects how we approach problem-solving and what types of solutions we added. For example, for me, the crisis of climate change is a symptom of the distress and imbalances of our planetary body and a sign as well of the erosion of place-based relationships, of course, the forced erosion of a lot of these things. It's also a sign of the deterioration of our collective well-being.

But with a fixation, for example, on the measurement of atmospheric carbon levels… I mean, there are many ways to reduce atmospheric carbon levels and emissions that do not actually address the root causes of what that imbalance represents. There are ways to reduce atmospheric carbon levels, while, for example, not actually healing place-based relationships and community, not making our ecological systems more diverse and resilient, and not improving people's senses of vitality and fulfillment and spiritual enrichment.

So what I've been trying to focus on is what it is exactly that we're really trying to heal and improve and better, such as our collective health, the diversity of life forms and ecosystems, resilience, and capacity for regeneration and so on, rather than at least overly fixating on these reductionistic abstractions that fail to tell the whole story.

Andy Letcher: I agree wholeheartedly. Thank you for bringing that into focus. All these issues are connected. They're all part of a deeper malaise, a sort of crisis of meaning. Yes, they are related. Some people are putting forward techno-solutions, eco-modernist solutions, or transhumanist solutions, which to me sound absolutely nightmarish. They're ghastly, they're just deepening the disconnect and using technology as a means to get there.

It's very easy to focus on the apocalypse. The apocalypse is a deep theme within Western culture. But what comes after?

What kind of world do we want after? How could we maintain some of the benefits of what we have now? We're having an amazing conversation here across continents, across time zones. I would hate to lose that. I think that one of the most beautiful things of the modern age is this connectivity.

But how could we keep that in a way in which we have a relationship to place, relationship with each other, diversity, resilience, and all these things you talk about? What would that ecological civilization look like after the collapse?

Kamea Chayne: To expand on how our worldviews shape how we relate to the planet, you also talk about animism, including the perhaps misguided early interpretations and views of the word and form of spirituality.

You share: "An animistic worldview is one I think that is deeply embedded in relationality, exactly the kind we need at this moment of crisis. So far from it being a ‘primitive thing,’ I think actually it can show us ways forward about how to be in the world, and how to be in the world with gratitude, knowledge, reciprocity.”

Of course, I know you know that religion and spirituality can be sensitive topics. I want to honor everyone for who and where they are in this. Just as there are a lot of different diets that are healthy and that look very different, we can still, I think, come to an agreement that certain ways of eating are less healthy and certain ways of eating are more nourishing, and with a lot of diversity within that. In a similar way, I also wonder if there's a lot of freedom of thought and belief. Diversity lends itself to resilience at the end of the day. I think generally it's a very positive thing to have a foundation that gives everybody the openness to feel and believe whatever we want to believe. That also gives us the freedom and openness to constantly evolve as well.

Although, with humility, I would also ask if there are certain worldviews that could be seen as less healthy for us as a collective, and certain worldviews that guide us to be able to better enhance life and our well-being. So how would you navigate this delicate topic and what do you think more people can learn from the animistic worldview?

Andy Letcher: So, as a scholar of religion, I would never impose any worldview on anyone. I find them all equally fascinating. But I think animism is helpful. Because I think it's very open to many people.

Animism is simply the view that sees the world as full of people, only some of whom are human, but all of whom are worthy of respect.

Instead of seeing that tree over there as a provider of shade or apples in the autumn or timber or whatever, I can see it as a person. I don't mean I'm not projecting humanness onto it. It's a tree person. What a tree person does is eat light and entertain intimacies with fungi and all these other species that dwell in it and with it. But if I regard it as being a person, if I afforded it personhood, then it behooves me to find the right and respectful way to relate to it. Now, sometimes that rote and respectful way to relate to it might be to cut it down and use its timber. Animism doesn't mean you don't kill things or you don't eat them, but it does mean that you do so with respect.

Now, we don't respect the world in a capitalist society. You go to the supermarket and there are just trays and trays full of meat. I've no idea where that meat came from or how the animal was treated. It certainly wasn't treated with respect. Were traditional cultures animistic? There may be all sorts of ways in which you respectfully relate to an animal if you're going to kill it and if you're going to eat it and after you've killed it and after you've eaten it. That's a very different kind of relationship. The same would apply to plants or trees. It's not an extractivist worldview. It's a worldview of respect and the ability of relationality.

Now, I'm not saying it's going to be the miracle cure, but I'm saying it's a very different way of relating to the world, one which means we have to pay attention to the other and ask, what does the other need? What does it require of us? What can we give back? It's about reciprocity. It's not about taking. It's about giving back to the world and taking only what we need. It doesn't require any kind of spiritual belief. You can be an atheist or you can be a theist. It doesn't matter. Animism is simply a way of relating to the non-human world that involves respectful relationships.

Kamea Chayne: I want to pivot to magic mushrooms and plant medicines.

As you've shared: "An ever-growing number of psychedelic enthusiasts claim that the judicious use of psychedelics (or plant medicines) can engender profound, even spiritual, experiences of nature connection. They suggest that at a time of ecological crisis, psychedelics might just be the tool we need to turn our attention from the human to the non-human, to restore our appreciation of the beauty of the world."

But you question if this is really the case, and I'm curious about this as well and would love it if you could take us through your train of thought on how you've challenged this claim and why, as you say, there must be first "a careful framing within a reimagined worldview."

Andy Letcher: There's a growing body of anecdotal evidence and now empirical evidence that the use of psychedelics, certain psychedelics, particularly psilocybin, ayahuasca, also iboga, these classic tryptamine psychedelics occasion profound experiences of connection with the non-human world. I say anecdotal because I collect a lot of trip reports and people tell me these stories.

At Imperial College in London, Sam Kennedy and his team have been trying to measure this empirically, that after a dose of psilocybin, people do tend to feel more connected to the non-human world, to nature. They feel more related to nature. But as you rightly point out, the question then is what does that mean? Does it translate into any lasting behavioral change?

Often it doesn't. It's easy to think that psychedelics can be this magic bullet that will save the world. But it's quite clear as far as research is coming out, [that’s not the case]. I read a paper recently about how there have been some very unsavory right-wing thinkers who've been pro-psychedelics. Psychedelics haven't made them into progressive liberals. If anything, they've hardened their right-wing views.

Likewise, we're seeing in America where the law is being softened and there's a move toward psychedelic-assisted therapy, the venture capitalists are moving in. They're seeing this as a great opportunity to make money. So it's not like psychedelics are making people become rabid anti-capitalists wanting to overthrow the system. On the contrary, they're seeing this as an opportunity to make a large profit.

So I see it as more like a figure of eight. Clearly, psychedelics can, in certain carefully-administered prescribed circumstances, afford people that experience of the nonhuman world, the type of experience that I started this podcast with that I experienced as a child. They can engender that. But we need more than that to effect change in the world. We need a worldview change, a change towards a more ecological self, a more porous self, an animistic self. The two go hand in hand. So we need animistic contexts in which people take psychedelics to enable them to become better animists.

Psychedelics are not a magic bullet. We need cultural change as well as the notice, the revelation, and the epiphanies that come with psychedelic experiences.

Kamea Chayne: So just having all of the people holding positions of power in political institutions or major corporations, all of them taking psychedelics, unfortunately, won't cut it, or lead to that awakening that is necessary for their and our collective healing.

Andy Letcher: I remember back in the nineties thinking, well, sooner or later the sixties generation will be in power and they'll all be psychedelic. Then utopia will come. Of course, that's happened and utopia hasn't come at all. In fact, the opposite. If anything, we're swinging more to a conservative world.

I mean, our current politicians were all drug takers in their youth. And, sorry—I'm talking very much about British politicians. I should be more circumspect about what I'm saying. There were some very serious and believable allegations about David Cameron when he was prime minister that in his youth, he had taken cocaine. He never confirmed or denied those allegations. But it does seem like they were a generation who in their youth were very open to using drugs. Just being a little bit careful about what I'm saying here.

Kamea Chayne: I appreciate you adding context to that. While we are coming to a close for our main discussion here, though, I want to leave this open for you now to share anything else you feel called to share at this moment, also just any other words of guidance that you have for our listeners.

Andy Letcher: These are unprecedented times. I'm not sure any species has faced a mass extinction [while] knowing that they're in mass extinction. This is the sixth mass extinction, but this is the first time we've known that this is happening, and it's in our power to do something about it. So, on one level, that's utterly depressing and bleak and awful. On another level, there's a sense in which nothing has changed. We were always going to die. We are mortal beings.

In the time that's given to us, I still think it's possible to create better worlds through opening ourselves to each other and to the world and opening ourselves to the sheer, exquisite beauty of being alive, the unfolding of a flower, the changing of the seasons, the exquisite beauty of a sunset. These are not insignificant things. This is our birthright, as humans, to experience the beauty of the world, knowing that our time here is always short-lived.

Whilst I'm not advocating quietism and, and sitting back and navel-gazing…

I want activism, I want the world to change, and I'm going to fight every step of the way for a better world. But at the same time, there is a beauty, a serenity that comes from accepting that our time here is limited and that we can just delight in the beauty of what the world is.

Kamea Chayne: Thank you. We are now going into our fire-round closing questions. What has been an impactful book that you've read or a publication that you follow?

Andy Letcher: Tyson Yunkaporta’s Sand Talk.

Kamea Chayne: What is a personal motto, mantra, or practice you engage with to stay grounded?

Andy Letcher: Just chill out.

Kamea Chayne: What is your greatest source of inspiration at the moment?

Andy Letcher: Bird songs. I try and learn a new bird song every year and try and understand the world through birdsong and bird calls. I find it incredibly moving and powerful.

Kamea Chayne: Andy, thank you so much for joining me on the show today. So grateful for our conversation and honored to have been able to share this dialogue with you. What final words of wisdom do you have for us as green dreamers?

Andy Letcher: Just keep on keeping on, and keep dreaming a green and better future.

 
kamea chayne

Kamea Chayne is a creative, writer, and the host of Green Dreamer Podcast.

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