029 - Reviving our relationship with nature through psychedelics with Dr Sam Gandy

My guest today is Dr Sam Gandy. Sam has a PhD in ecological science from the University of Aberdeen and an MRes in entomology from Imperial College London. He is a writer, speaker, amateur mycologist and has a lifelong love of nature and wildlife. He has conducted field research in various parts of the world including the UK, Kefalonia, Almeria, Texas, the Peruvian Amazon, Vietnam and Ethiopia. Most relevant to our conversation, he also has experience of working in the psychedelic field, as a scientific assistant to the director of the Beckley Foundation, and currently as a collaborator with the Centre for Psychedelic Research at Imperial College London. His research is focussed on the capacity of psychedelics to (re)connect our increasingly disconnected species to nature, for the potential betterment of humanity and the biosphere at large. In our conversation we explore the findings of a large study Sam participate in that explored how psychedelics impact on the user’s experience of connection to nature. If you’ve read my writing on this subject you will know that I have an ambiguous relationship with psychedelics. On the one hand I appreciate the way they can broaden our experience of life and help us transcend outdated paradigms. On the other I have had equally transformative expreriences without the use of any substances and I believe that there is in fact a risk that overuse of psychedelics can impede our innate capacity to access these transformative altered states. I was very happy to be able to explore this and other topics with someone as measured and experienced in this field as Dr Gandy.

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