[00:00:13] Speaker A: Welcome to Brainforest Cafe with Dennis McKenna.
[00:00:21] Speaker B: Giuliana Forci is the founder and CEO of the Fungi foundation. She is also an associate at Harvard University, a National Geographic explorer, a dame of the Order of the Star of Italy, the deputy chair of the IUCN Fungal Conservation Committee, and the author of several titles, including a series of field guides to chilean fungi. She has co authored titles such as the first State of the World's Fungi, published by Q in 2018, and the publication that delimits the term funga and the three f proposal, Fauna, Flora, and funga in that publication.
And so, as you can tell, she has incredible list of credentials to her name. And I wanted to especially mention that she is the recipient of, of the steward of Biodiversity Award from the McKenna Academy that we gave to her in 2022 at the ESPD 55 symposium. She traveled all the way from Chile to receive that award, and we were honored to be able to bestow it on her. So, as you'll find in this conversation, Juliana is a very energetic person with lots of things going on. And we're eager to talk about this latest project that she is working on with some colleagues to create, essentially an archive of mazatecan literature.
So it's my pleasure to welcome Juliana to the brain Forest cafe.
[00:02:11] Speaker A: Hello, Dennis. Thank you very much.
[00:02:14] Speaker B: Hi, Juliana. Did I leave anything important out?
[00:02:19] Speaker A: I think that's good.
[00:02:22] Speaker B: Okay. Well, it's a real, it's a real pleasure to have you on the show. And, you know, we've been in several different places together, and I have nothing but great admiration for you, your energy, and you're the kind of people that gets attention and gets things done. And I think last time I was visiting you up at Paul Stamets place a couple of summers ago, you were here, or you were in BC, rather, and you just got like two back to back articles in the New York Times. And not simply in the back to back, but upper on the front fold on the front page. So you're an incredible public relations wizard as far as I'm concerned.
I wish we had that kind of clout.
The New York Times has so far ignored the McKenna Academy, but maybe this will change things. So tell me a bit about this project you're working on. The Welta Seur, which is a foundation, the philanthropic arm of Weltesur, is to discover and support young artists with limited financial resources. The foundation supports initiatives that provide essential art training and transcend borders, emphasizing connections between Mexico's indigenous communities. The foundation is dedicated to preserving knowledge and wisdom of ancestors, ensuring that this heritage is cherished and passed down to future generations. And then in connection with this, you have this collaborative project that you're working on. The, excuse my Spanish, I will probably butcher this, but the historia, see, memorious Mazatecus archive will be one of the most comprehensive collections of Mazatec records, textiles, historical artifacts, and video and sound recordings to protect this invaluable archive. The fungi Foundation Veltus and Historius Imamorius Mazatecus Argalaunching a fundraising campaign to establish the first museum in the region dedicated to Mazatec heritage, including, of course, Maria Sabinas legacy. And there is this event. I can share a bit of information about this event that youve got going.
[00:05:01] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:05:02] Speaker B: And this will be in Vancouver. This is an in person event on September 1.
Unfortunately, I'm going to be out of town, but you'll have Paul Stamets and the Fungi foundation. The memorious Mazatenka and Veltusur will be holding this fundraiser in North Vancouver on September 1.
[00:05:30] Speaker A: Yeah, it's a glorious event that will also have a live performance by Tarun Nayal, or known as modern biology, who makes music with bioelectrical acoustic sounds emitted by fungi and plants and others. So it promises a great event.
[00:05:53] Speaker B: Right. Here's information about the event. Veltasur.com pages, donations, and you can register for the event there or find out more about it from that. So tell me what's exciting you besides this project, or tell me about this project, what was the origins of this project?
[00:06:20] Speaker A: You know, Dennis, this is one of those projects that, I'd say one of the very few projects in my life that are as dear as can be to the heart. And the way this all started is quite magical.
It was more than ten years ago I visited Wautla, the Jimenez in Oaxaca in Mexico, to, as a pilgrimage to lay some flowers on Maria Sabina's tomb. And so I visited for less than a day. I arrived in wildlife, went to the cemetery, but before going to the cemetery, I decided to go and make an offering at Maria Sabina's house, her family home, and had a very special encounter where it was made clear to me that I was expected in Wauplae and that through ceremony, there had been news of the arrival of somebody coming with some sort of purpose. And nothing was very clear at that moment of my visit in Wautla. And I went to the cemetery and I paid my respects and left Waupla. And then about three or four years ago, I got a message from Inti Garcia Flores. My brother Inti. And Iti writes to me and says that he's the son of an archivist who was the town's photographer and videographer, Don Renato Garcia.
And many people might, you know, the surname Dorantes might ring a bell because it's an important surname in the history of how the west got to know of the use of sciosbi.
And so Inti writes to me and says, you know, I am the guardian of an archive that my father built with photography. There's photographs, videos, textiles, ceramics, documents. And the whole archive is falling to pieces. It's being consumed by mold, by moths, bye. Termites that were eating the cellulose of the film. And this whole archive, historical archive, was in a room in a house that had serious leakage problems, etcetera. So immediately I thought something ran a bell about a purpose of why I'd been to wildland. He sort of mentioned that he'd known of my visit and of how expected I had been there. And he asked for my help. He said, could you help me try to save this archive?
Of course, I immediately said yes and got part of the Fungi Foundation's team together. So the Fungi foundation, which is this organization that I founded 1213 years ago in Chile, but that also works in the US and in other places around the world. And so I got a team together to start putting, like looking at a crowdfunding campaign.
I met Inti and his family on Zoom, and we had a bit of a look at what was happening and realized that what we had to do is find the funding to hang in and then move this archive before it was lost.
At that point, we didn't really know all the details of things that were in the archive. We did know that there were a lot of never seen before photographs of not only Maria Sabina, but also other Curanderos and Curanderas that were working with La Pastora, with Saibia, with morning glory, with cacao, with maize, with, of course, mushrooms. And so we got together this little campaign to start looking for the funding to move and clean the archive. And before doing that, before launching the campaign, you know, one evening, the night before, I thought, I think I need to tell Pablo Paul stamets about this. Paul Stamets is a board member of the Fungi foundation and he's a very dear friend of mine, 20 years of yours, more.
So I called Pablo up and I was like, pablo, for those who don't know, we lovingly call Paul Pablo. It's very hard to call him Paul.
So I called Pablo up and I'm like, palo, there's this archive, and then we're putting together this campaign and we're going to save it. And he immediately asked. He said, okay, sister, how much do you need to save this archive? And we'd calculated that we needed about $25,000 to do the whole job. And he said, you know what? I'm going to fund this, see what's there, save it, and then let's move forward. And so Paul was the first donor to support the saving of this archive. And when we got in there to see, I immediately, with Inti, started working to buy boxes to get things out, etcetera. We finally built a new storage facility, and Inti and his family cleaned all of the material that were there and moved them to the new storage facility. What was found that was in there was incredible. So, for example, there's footage, for example, of a day in the life of Dona Julieta, for example, one of the 13 grandmothers. No, there's footage of Maria Sabina's wedding, of Maria Sabina visiting her family at the cemetery of Maria Sabina.
[00:11:58] Speaker B: That's incredible. Those are incredible things.
[00:12:02] Speaker A: Yeah, really, really incredible things. That's just the tip of the iceberg. And so Inti and his family invited me to collaborate with them and there forward in now that we more or less saved the material of the archive to work, to back it up, to restore it, but most importantly, to fulfill his father, Don Renato Garcia Dorantes, the archivist's wish, which was for all of that to be shown and to be at service of keeping Mercatek culture alive for the Mazatecs. So the idea was always for all the material there to be kept in the region, hopefully in Wautla, and for it to be shown and exhibited to teach younger generations about their culture and their traditions, and also to reintroduce some of the lost traditions and culture that.
That the archive holds as teachings. For example, the loom, the Mazatec loom and weaving, or, for example, the evolution of the clothing and the weepil. And there's a whole explanation, and there are pieces there to show that. So I accepted that invitation. And we've been working for many years now in backing up the archive, and we have finally rented a small place in Wautna to build the first 1st edition of this museum. But the true dream, Dennis, is to build a museum, a permanent museum in Waldia that houses permanent exhibits, but also temporary exhibits that the archive holds, and for it to be able to receive donations from other places in that region of cultural and traditional objects and information of importance, in a nutshell.
[00:14:05] Speaker B: Well, that is so important to preserve this traditional knowledge, because as somebody who's had a bit of my own challenging experiences, tried to preserve libraries and rainforests, particularly with regard to my brother's library, which he had in his house in Hawaii. And I had to somehow deal with it after he died. And there was no, I mean, books and rainforests and humid environments don't get along so well. So it was rather a challenge. So I understand the challenges that you're facing with this.
[00:14:46] Speaker A: What did you do in the end?
How did you do?
[00:14:52] Speaker B: Well, it's a long story.
I don't want to go down that it's a long rabbit hole, but it didn't end well, actually, we got the material transferred to California. It was supposed to go to SLN, but then the warehouse they had it stored in was completely consumed by fire in 2007.
That was it for this incredible library. But this is not about my story. This is about.
And of course Paul, you know, we share that friendship. I think I can call him Pablo too. I know him that well.
And he's just the kind of guy who steps up when he sees a project like this and says, you know, of course I'm going to support it because he recognizes the value of this, preserving this knowledge.
And he has a good heart and a good head and realizes how important it is to preserve this information.
But the project you're talking about, he's provided the seed funding to build this storage facility, begin to clean up some of the material and get rid of the bolts and all that.
But it seems like you have a longer term ambition that will cost a lot more than that. Not that it is worth it.
[00:16:21] Speaker A: Absolutely. And that initial donation from Paul that made all this possible was followed up with quite a lot more of important fundraising with collaborations from people in the psychedelic space. And also outside Alma Institute held an amazing fundraiser and many people have contributed and we raised, and to date we've raised quite a lot. I mean, under $100,000, but quite a lot of money that has enabled us to clean back up, restore, maintain to the point of the incompatibility of a library and rainforest. The storage facility has dehumidifiers. They're constantly running.
[00:17:11] Speaker B: Right. This is very important. Do you have any plans to digitize these collections or is that on the plate? Is that hoped for?
[00:17:21] Speaker A: So we've been digitizing almost everything that is digitizable. And that's where a lot of the funds of bit have been destined to, to date, which is in backing up the archives. So scanning negatives, positives, backing up vhs, better max tapes, and in some cases, even we have to develop film. We've also been digitizing a lot of the textile patterns that are held in this archive. There are many old, traditional patterns that are held, patterns for embroidery of traditional dress. And so we've been doing that. But what has happened now, which has been super interesting, is that last year I had the delight of visiting the archive with brothers Merlin and Cosmo Sheldrake, who you also know quite well and whose friendship we share. And so we visited with Merlin and Cosmo and got to get quite a deep dive into the archive. And it was there that after that visit that Merlin said, you know what? I have some friends who might be interested in helping. And he contacted the Fungi foundation, and I was the guardian of the archive, who we do nothing apart in this project with Paola Costello and Gabriela Gonzalez, who run Voita surrender Foundation, Vuelta Sur, and it was Vuelta Sur foundation who, through Merlin's contact, decided to support our project with this fundraiser. So the deep, I mean, we cannot be more grateful to Voita Sud for supporting, and really, from that deep love and respect and care of mexican culture. They have teamed up with us for this fundraiser to be able to raise, we aim to raise $250,000 to build the museum with permanent facilities for these exhibits. And that's our goal with Vuelta Sur. It's our goal with this fundraiser. And, you know, Dennis, I'm really confident that we're going to be able to do it.
[00:19:40] Speaker B: Oh, yes, I think you will. I think you'll be able to.
And, you know, with the magic of digitization, I mean, you can create a virtual museum long before you build a physical museum, and that, of course, will attract attention and support and educate people. So this is absolutely wonderful project. And like so many things that you pursue, you know, Juliana, you just identify good things and then you execute, and you do it very well. So I'm really happy to see you working on this, on this project.
What else do you have going in your life? I know you're traveling. You must have, I think you've reserved the first seat in the business class on the anchor or whatever. You must constantly be in the air.
[00:20:37] Speaker A: Well, you know, it's funny, there's a lot of very interesting stuff, but, as you know, also, I'm a mother of a young man, a 17 year old, so, I mean, I travel a lot, but I spend more time at home cooking and washing than I do up in the air, although it doesn't seem that way, but I'm still very much in the nurturing mode of motherhood.
[00:21:03] Speaker B: That's good. That's good. Don't talk about that. But that's kind of normal life as goes on. But then, on the other hand, all this professional stuff and pursuing your passion.
[00:21:16] Speaker A: And your mission and the Fungi foundation has a lot going on at the moment.
So we work to conserve the world's fungi. That's really our slogan, our mission, and we do that through. Through different programs. One of the programs is conservation, where, as you mentioned in the beautiful introduction you gave of my work and the bio, from delimiting language to refer to fungi alongside plants and animals, to pushing it through international and national public policies in different parts of the world. And that work has been very successful. And what we're, what very exciting things coming ahead is working for the UN Convention on Biodiversity to also join the global movement and hopefully declare that fungi must be included alongside plants and animals in reporting on biodiversity.
We also have an incredible education program where we've developed a free curriculum, mycological curriculum, initially designed with fantastic fundai and the team, but today very much housed in the Fungi foundation. And it's a curriculum that has been translated to both Portuguese and Spanish. So it's available in three languages, English, Portuguese and Spanish. It's completely free. You can find it through the Fungi foundation website. And not only does it have material to teach children through the resources available, but it also has webinars to teach teachers how to teach about fungi and all stages of schooling from k five to senior year.
[00:23:09] Speaker B: Well, that's very necessary. Even teachers in biology often, they, of course, know about fungi, but very fewer really educated about it. It's kind of the neglected. The neglected phylum, or kingdom, actually, as we know, since we're enthusiasts about fungi, it's by far one of the most interesting kingdoms because fungi are just amazing in themselves and more similar to animals than they are to plants.
I mean, people, even now, they think of fungi as plants. And it used to be in mycology, was a subset of botany departments, but no longer.
[00:23:57] Speaker A: Yeah, cryptogamic. Do you remember?
[00:23:59] Speaker B: He recognized that mycology and fungi are their own thing and very important in the biosphere. Yeah.
[00:24:09] Speaker A: Enabling plant life on earth. And that's actually, I'd say just one of the small attributes is no plant can live out of water without them very much.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: Oh.
[00:24:21] Speaker A: And very few plants.
So, yeah, that part of education and conservation is complemented at the foundation with a program called the Elders Program, where we strive to. We have collated, basically, we have collated all the ancestral relationships known between humanity and fungi. And it's been a titanic task of many years looking at peer reviewed publications, general publications, oral history, to see how humanity and fungi, outside of edibility alone, have culturally co evolved and how they have related.
And we got this big database and map together and very quickly realized that we had to just very much face the ethical questions surrounding being complicit to sharing information that had been obtained without informed consent.
And so at the foundation, we took on the task of building the ethnomycological ethical guidelines. And it's the first set of guidelines, guiding principles elaborated specifically for fungi.
And they're also available at f. Fungi.org, at the Fungi foundation's page. And there one can.
[00:25:53] Speaker B: How do you spell that? Is it ffungi?
[00:25:58] Speaker A: Yes.org?
[00:26:01] Speaker B: So double fD. So it's aff. Not one f, but two f's. Yeah, I'll try to put it in the text box before it auto corrects back to something incorrect. This is your organization. This is your foundation.
[00:26:22] Speaker A: A lot of work in that interface of how humanity and fungi have culturally co evolved together. And all of this is very much complemented with expeditions, which is, you know, we travel to places where nobody's ever been before to look for fungi. And that's, you know, that's where a lot of the spiritual nurturing comes from, to be able to continue.
[00:26:46] Speaker B: Yeah, yes, well, yeah, this is important because fungi, at least mushrooms, of all the psychedelics, mushrooms probably have the oldest relationship to humanity. And my brother was a big originator of the stone date theory, and I've sort of elaborated on it.
And people can see my presentations on this, but I think it's a not unreasonable, you can make a plausible case that mushrooms have had this symbiotic alliance with human beings before they were anything we would call human, that we've basically co evolved. And because what we know now about what they do, what psychedelics, what psilocybin specifically does to brain architecture and increasing connectivity and all this. Just today I was reading an article in New Scientists that was talking about why have we evolved big brains? What's the use of big brains?
It's been the assumption that bigger brains mean more intelligence and so on, but not necessarily. There are things now discovered, like Homo florensis and the nalady. And these folks, they were complex, they were intelligent, they made tools, they had probably religion, and they were very small because they were small people.
And so this article was talking about, it's not the size of the brain, it's the complexity of the brain. It's the number of folds and the neural complexity. The one sort of, you know, and they were saying, well, you know, because these were small people, they had small skulls, but their brains were complex because they were stuffed in such a small place. And I'm thinking, you know, you guys are not seeing the elephant in the room here. You know, here is something, or the mushroom in the room here is something known to stimulate neural complexity and connectivity, and we bombed with this thing. And genetically over millions of years, that's got to affect. That has to have played a role, I believe, and I think you could make it a pretty good case for it without sounding like a complete wing nut.
[00:29:28] Speaker A: One of the very exciting, other very exciting projects that I'm collaborating on. Some people don't know very much about it, but there's a scientific, you know, more academic scientific side to my work, which includes species discovery and others. But in this particular case, I'm really, really excited about a project that I collaborate on led by Doctor Bryn Dentinger.
[00:29:51] Speaker B: Bryn, I know he was at EsPD 55.
[00:29:55] Speaker A: Yeah, he was there. And so with Bryn, I've been collaborating with him and his team, where we've been looking at, um, full genome sequencing of psilocybin. Psilocybin. Psilocybin, the genus Psilocybin, to understand, you know, what's happening, what. Where the synonymities are within the genus, et cetera. But we've also been looking at the biogeographical history of the genus, and what we know is that to now, to date, with the information we have, the genus, um, originates in what today is Ethiopia. So we know that the origin of homo sapiens and the origin of the genus Psilocybe is in the same geographical era.
[00:30:43] Speaker B: His work shows that the genus Psilocybin originated in Ethiopia, not just cupensis, but the whole genus.
[00:30:52] Speaker A: Right.
[00:30:53] Speaker B: So from Juliana, that pretty much nails it down, doesn't it?
[00:30:58] Speaker A: There's a lot of work to do. There's a lot still to do, but what we can, and we are actually planning some expeditions to the continent of Africa to follow this up. But, I mean, this is not set in stone, is in the fact that there are still a lot of species to get full genome sequencing of, but today know is that it's pretty much originating in Africa.
[00:31:27] Speaker B: So, so through these molecular techniques, you could. You could basically find the common ancestor.
[00:31:36] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:31:36] Speaker B: Of genius. And you can trace it. My God, that pretty well nails it down, if you ask me. Of course you didn't ask me. Nobody asks me. But I think that. I think that's a piece of the puzzle. It shows that this genus originated in North Africa at the same time that hominids originated in more or less the same area, the northern Sahara, what's now the northern Sahara. So I think that's, oh, before.
[00:32:06] Speaker A: Right, so before homo sapiens. I'll send over so we can put some of the publications up in the link, in the text box, in the page. But there's a lot of support to that and to the. The hypothesis or the theory of the star ape.
[00:32:23] Speaker B: And, of course, we know from fossil evidence that there were camel in this area. They've got fossil remains of cattle, the precursors of modern Cebu cattle, which evolved in this area around the same time these hominids were there. Where you've got the hominids. You've got the cattle.
[00:32:43] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:32:44] Speaker B: Oh, shit. I. You had to have lunch.
[00:32:46] Speaker A: Exactly. Yeah. And so the lead author on these papers is Alex Bradshaw, and I invite everybody to take a look. There are two papers. I'll put them now in the text. In the text box. I'm just putting this one in. And one from 2022 and the other one from just this year, one on the DNA authentication and chemical analysis of phylosy mushrooms reveal inconsistencies, et cetera, in fungaria. And that's tending towards the possibility of being able to move specimens without the DEA approval.
The team showed that psilocybin degrades and then old specimens is no longer present, so that we wouldn't need those permits.
And then another more recent paper, um, from this year, which is called phylogenomics of the psychoactive mushroom genus psilocybin, and evolution of the psilocybin biosynthetic gene cluster. So I'll be putting both of these into the chat box.
[00:33:54] Speaker B: Okay? Yes, please do. Because we can. We can link to those from the podcast website. I think that this would be very interesting to people. Yeah. You know, this is amazing, considering all the barkers are there, everything points to this. And considering we're trying to sort out co evolutionary events that took place maybe as far back as 2 million years ago, I mean, that is pretty amazing.
I think you can make a strong case that the or psychedelic, if there is such a thing, had to be a mushroom, not a plant. I mean, for example, ayahuasca is a very sophisticated plant preparation. It can't be older than more than a couple of thousand years, there's no definite idea. Some people have said maybe a thousand bc.
Well, that was yesterday compared to the mushrooms, you know, so, yeah, so that's very interesting. Well, so what else is going on? Or what could be more exciting than that?
[00:35:09] Speaker A: So exciting, isn't it? One of the really exciting things that are happening around, you know, just around these ancestral relationships and what's happening in a global movement is what the Fungi foundation and our team are doing around rights of nature.
As you may know, there is a global movement that is and also leading countries that are working really hard to give legal beinghood or personhood to non human species.
Ecuador and Bolivia, for example, have rights of nature in their constitutions.
Chile, unfortunately, rejected the proposal of a constitution that included rights of nature. But there are places, there are rivers in India, there are turtles in Panama, and many other examples of places where non human beings have illegal being hood and have rights. And at the Fungi foundation, we're working with a group called Mos, the more than human rights movement, led by NYU, New York University. And we're working to explore different areas of the more than human rights legal world. But very specifically in our case, looking at how giving rights to a mushroom species, for example, to a fungus, can accelerate habitat protection or can accelerate protection of eco. Yes, as you know, most fungi are specific to. To their hosts or to their symbionts.
And what that ensures is that in that very deep personal and essential relationship, relationship between a fungus and its symbiont, they are inseparable. So when you protect a fungus, you are essentially protecting its symbiont. And in the case of fungi that forms symbiosis with species that are living and that are restricted to a certain area, you can achieve the protection of a habitat through the protection of the fungus. And that's, for me, another one of those very, very exciting areas of work where the fungi foundation is working to make progress on an international level. So we're looking at a case in Ecuador. We're working with lawyers and ex judges in Ecuador to see if we can put forward a case of protecting a particular locality through giving rights and legal being hood to a mushroom.
[00:37:55] Speaker B: What about other organisms in that ecosystem? Don't they have rights, too?
[00:38:00] Speaker A: They do have rights. They have. Of course they have rights, but they may not be restricted. So, for example, or they may not be inseparable from the habitat. So why are fungi so, so important in this scenario? First is because there are many species that are inseparable from the ecosystem with plants. You can take them to a botanic garden, for example. In many cases with animals, you can take them to a zoo in many cases. But with fungi, you cannot separate them from their ecosystems.
[00:38:33] Speaker B: Right. If you're going to protect the fungi, they cannot be taken out of their habitat. You have to protect the habitat. But this whole thing about, I mean, it's very interesting, this sort of discovery of personhood being hood in non human organisms. It kind of has the air of inevitability about it and long overdue by several million years. Or actually, I think there was probably a certain time in history when I, when this was in indigenous people, this is always understood. You know, these are plant teachers, these are fungal teachers. Whatever they are, they have their own intelligence. But then, you know, into the reductionist, post renaissance, you know, so called scientific era, this was last sight of. But it raises many if, if fungal or non human, if plant and fungal intelligence and rights begin to be recognized, that raises some very interesting questions about our relationship. So if we domesticate a plant, are we enslaving it? I mean, can you say, is that slave or is it symbiosis? It's like, well, the plant and the human partner got together, but the plant, you know.
[00:40:06] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:40:06] Speaker B: So when asked if they wanted to be part of this symbiosis, but I guess the fact that they participate and thrive under those circumstances, I mean, it's just a very interesting idea. What if it doesn't want to be domesticated? Like, what about, you know, I mean, Michael Pollan often has talked a lot about corn, the relationship color evolutionary with relationship between corn and the human species, and has made the point that corn is the perfect crop for international monoculture, industrial agriculture, ineffectively as domesticated humans.
[00:40:47] Speaker A: Yes.
[00:40:48] Speaker B: Just spread across the planet.
[00:40:51] Speaker A: I mean, in Merlin Sheldrake's fabulous book entangled life, he makes the case that philosophy cubansis has domesticated us and has thrived and has spread all over the world.
[00:41:04] Speaker B: That's exactly what it's done. Yeah, exactly.
[00:41:06] Speaker A: Right. So these are really, really great questions, and there are many, many people addressing these questions and thinking about them. So I invite everybody to
[email protected] so, morethanhumanrights.org, comma. And you'll find some things written and published there. And more than that, there is a next year the fantastic british author Robert Macfarlane, who many of you might know from reading Underland or the old ways, some of his great books. He has written a book called is a river Alive? And it's going to be published next year. What is it called is a river alive.
[00:41:49] Speaker B: Okay.
[00:41:50] Speaker A: It's about rights of nature. And it talks about that history where you were saying, the history of our detachment from the obvious, obvious notion that non human beings have rights.
And so it talks exactly about what happened with the scientific era on set with the Catholic Church, et cetera, and how rites of nature have. Have changed, how non human beings lost rights, in a way, just very recently, and how important it is to get back on track. But they're very interesting questions. And in the definition of why you would give rights, it's the right to thrive. So if you're reproducing and ensuring that a species thrives, you know, it's different to whether you're reproducing and maybe not ensuring that a species thrives. And so there are many, many philosophical and many practical legal issues to tackle around rights of nature.
[00:43:00] Speaker B: Absolutely. This is. Yeah, I mean, this is really sort of expanding the whole perspective beyond the human species. In my own ransom raves, I've talked about the right to symbiosis. We should start to assert the right to symbiosis. So it goes beyond, it transcends simply human right. It's a right of any organism to form a symbiotic relationship with any other organisms. So it's not confined to humans and the domestication of a plant or the. The utilization of a plant for nutrition, or whatever it may be used for, for ritual purposes or whatever. Any mutual beneficial. Any relationship between plants and fungi and humans that's mutually beneficial is a symbiosis, is a kind of symbiosis, and we should commence. Elizabeth, in the legal sphere, we should assert this. This is why the idea that we have the. The authority to say, declare that we're going to eradicate coca from the earth, or we're going to eradicate opium from the earth. I mean, the human arrogance that this bespeaks is just godsmacking, frankly. Who has the authority to declare that Coco can't exist or poppies can't exist? I mean, this is, you know, I mean, this is.
[00:44:33] Speaker A: Yeah. And the cannabis movement has done an incredible job at, you know, trying to stop that and effectively stopping it in so many places around the world. I think, you know, just as a gate, you know, gate opener to everything else that we need to do.
[00:44:51] Speaker B: Yeah.
[00:44:52] Speaker A: And when. But what we're seeing is that, you know, having these rights and rights of nature are very, very in the places where in South America, and South America leads not only fungal conservation from Chile, you know, we're very proud of that. But south american countries lead the movement of rights of nature. Ecuador, Bolivia, others. And it's very, very tight knit and held within indigenous cosmovisions. And what we're seeing there is that there is this, you know, this move to maintain those ancestral relationships with non human beings under the wing of indigenous people, once again preserving not only the habitats, but these symbiosis and commensurism with the plants and with the fungi and with the animals. So hopefully the rights of nature movement that has, in many cases, specific articles tied to the rights of indigenous peoples to keep maintaining their cultural heritage and traditions and medicines and food. And maybe through that symbiosis of rights of nature with indigenous cosmovisions, we'll be able to hopefully get rights for medicinal plants and fungi and animals that help help us heal the spirit.
[00:46:19] Speaker B: Right, right. Yeah. Well, indigenous people have always been the stewards of the genetics as well as the knowledge associated with these medicinal plants, medicinal fungi and so on. So this is a very interesting thing that this is an area now for public discourse, the idea of non, non human rights. I have to wonder what this is going to look like in a legal sense in 100 years from now. Of course, we probably won't be around in 100 years the way things are going. But we can dream, we can speculate, but it could be a very different picture because the sickness that has infected our species, our civilization, has basically to do with this estrangement from nature. And that springs out of the perspective that we own nature. It's dead. It's not really a lot separate and the relative just something for us to exploit. Yeah, that's what's killing the planet. And ultimately that's what's going to kill us, is to.
So we have to.
The fact that this discussion is taking place at this very fundamental level might mean that eventually a legal framework would deburge for protecting non human rights. And you can't create that framework without recognizing that non humans do have rights.
[00:48:00] Speaker A: Absolutely.
[00:48:02] Speaker B: I've been reading several science fiction books.
You know, that's how I learned a lot. But a couple of science fiction books have come out there, what is called the Mountain under the sea, which I highly recommend. Do you know it?
[00:48:20] Speaker A: I don't. I'm going to write it down.
[00:48:23] Speaker B: It's a fiction book, but it's centered around a colony of octopuses that was discovered in some tropical island in the South Seas. In this particular colony turns out to actually have language and culture and to be more sophisticated than anyone imagined. It's an amazing book because it tells a ripping good story. It's by Ray Naylor and it's the mountain under the sea.
[00:48:55] Speaker A: Mountain under the sea.
[00:48:57] Speaker B: Thurley is fantastic. But then each chapter also opens with a long screen read about what is consciousness, what is intelligence? I mean, the deep philosophical to say, I just love this book.
It shows, you know, and I've come to respect octopuses a lot more. Not. Not that I didn't respect them before, but I always thought, you know, fried calamari was a good thing. I can't be like dolphins or something. I just. I read, I can't eat a species. That's. That's that I am, you know, to be very smart. To be smart.
A lot of stuff is off the menu.
[00:49:43] Speaker A: Oh, no, no. Visiting Peru.
But, you know, this is this whole thing about rights of nature and rights of, you know, rights to maintain relationships and symbiosis between non humans and other non humans and non humans and humans takes us back to the importance of this archive. I want to just, you know, before our time is up, just come back and invite people to support this project. Because what we're doing with this archive is effectively protect ancestral knowledge of old relationships between humans and non humans, not only psilocybe, you know, psilocybe species, but also a lot of plant species and a lot of the rituals in this archive, there are detailed videos and accounts of the preparation of the mortuary preparation of humans when they leave this plane and go to the infra world. In Mazatec cosmovision, there are detailed accounts and footage of how maze is used in divination and several very important relationships between non humans and humans. So for me, although it seems a detached project, they're very much attached. And everything we do in this relationship with rights of nature, with conservation of fungi in policy, and then with conservation of this archive that holds this knowledge of information between humans and non humans. So, you know, if anybody can support, please do. The Fungi foundation manages this project together with the family, with inti Garcia Flores and his family, in a very, very loving relationship and long relationship. And so through the Fungi foundation, you can donate and you can also participate in this incredible fundraiser that Walta Sur is putting together with the Fungi foundation and Paul stamets and the historias y memorias Masatecas on September 1 in Vancouver. So I just wanted to bring it back to that.
[00:52:01] Speaker B: I want to put the poster up again. This is the.
This is the fundraiser on the 1 September in north Vancouver.
[00:52:10] Speaker A: Yeah.
[00:52:10] Speaker B: And you won't be there I'm sorry I won't be there either. I have to do some traveling. But the people that are coming, I think they can learn all about this. So if you want to come to this event or support it online, we'll have all the links and everything up. I just wanted to. I just wanted to show that poster one more time. It's. I so regret I can't make it. It's going to be a wonderful, wonderful get together of beautiful souls and like minded folks who really care about the planet and, and non human intelligence and all that. Actually, he sees beyond us. Yeah. So, Juliana, I want to thank you for taking time to talk to us. We're just about at the top of the hour here, so I guess we'll end it here. But we'll put everything on the podcast website. And if you think of anything else we need to put up there, why, just let me know. And we'll try to drop this podcast post to the date of the fundraiser so that it'll be in the top of people's minds. So probably in the week before the 1 September.
[00:53:24] Speaker A: Well, thank you so much, Stacey. I mean, it means the world to us to have, you know, this opportunity to share, and it means the world to me always to be able to have a good chat with you.
It's good that over the last few years, it's been at least once a year that we get to have a good chat.
[00:53:40] Speaker B: Yes. You keep showing up in places you're much more pathetic than I am, but it's great to see you again and even virtually. And good luck with all your travels, and we'll be in touch. We'll have another podcast one of these days soon.
[00:53:59] Speaker A: We will. And a big hug. And thank you very much.
[00:54:02] Speaker B: They tug you. Much gratitude. Much gratitude.
[00:54:06] Speaker A: Thank you.
[00:54:07] Speaker B: Have a wonderful day.
[00:54:09] Speaker A: Thank you.
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