Reflections on Garden States 2022
If you weren’t at Garden States 2022, then you might not believe it. 500 plant heads in person, and another 250 live streaming. Wow!
Where else can you float between conversations with leading mycologists, underground ayahuasca facilitators, agricultural policy makers, expert orchid breeders and world-renowned visual artists?
The ethnobotanical community that is Entheogenesis Australis is an incredibly complex ecology.
In his cacti Q&A, Keeper Trout suggested that it is not only us that experience plants, contending that plants experience us too. The plant perspective is a difficult one to conceive, but perhaps Janet Laurence took us closest to understanding, with her lecture, ‘The Alchemical Life’, representing how plants might live, breathe and dream. The panel ‘Breathed into Being: Ecodelia in Contemporary Art’ took post-humanism and nature even further, exploring attempts to communicate with more-than-human species on which our very existence depends.
We got our hands dirty, spreading plants, seeds and community knowledge in the workshops. We cloned mushrooms, grafted cacti, talked community ethics standards, made plant tissue cultures, fought pollution with fungi and learned about integrating psychedelic experiences.
Psychedelic medicine is growing like a weed, and the buds were everywhere – we heard about several ongoing clinical trials, as well as the expanding field of psychedelic drug design and even the investigation of an ayahuasca-inspired medicine using material from Australian Acacias. We made sure the psychedelic underground was represented too. Our community made sure to voice their critiques of big pharma, industry, sustainability and medicalisation as a pathway towards drug reform. We stayed true to our value of citizen science with psychoactive plants, perhaps best exemplified by Snu Voogelbreinder’s presentation, ‘Tobacco substitutes in Australia: the whitefella perspective.’ Anna Conrick also made sure discussions of psychedelic-assisted psychotherapy didn’t completely disregard beauty, with her contribution ‘Bill Richard’s Living Room: How are we Designing Psychedelic Clinical Spaces?’
Of course, there was far more fantastic content then we’re able to list here. From the genetics of Australian psilocybin mushrooms to nitrous oxide at the dentist, to psychedelics in virtual reality - Garden States 2022 had it all. If you missed the conference, we’ve just released an after-access ticket, so you can view all conference lectures online and get a copy of the Garden States 2022 conference journal.
