Eco-Pedagogy and/Through Entheogens: For a Critical Sustainability Education as a Science of Cosmic Well-Being, Consciousness Alternation, and New Sensibilities

• In Event: Roundtable Session 15
  In Roundtable Session: New Directions in EcoPedagogy

Abstract

Ecopedagogy works for cognitive praxis in three broad literacy areas: cosmology, technology, and knowledge organization (i.e., science). This paper explores the ways in which hallucinogenic plant- and fungi-based entheogens (meaning “generating the god within”) have long girded traditions of education and sustainability in both Indigenous and critical countercultures. I theoretically analyze them as (1) cosmological teachers of spiritualized nature, as (2) “tools of conviviality” that can be used to co-construct knowledge about the world and/with oneself in a manner that can appropriately inform the movement for the commons; and as (3) medicinal healers (i.e., Pharmakon) that can alleviate the stress of psychic and somatic trauma writ large, and so contribute to a sustainable science of well-being that is necessary today.

Author

• Richard V. Kahn, Antioch University Los Angeles