Symbiosis on Acid

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between Gaian ecology and psychedelic experience in the fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin and the work of ethnobotanist and psychonaut Terence McKenna. Both authors use psychedelics to open perspectives on symbiosis as a model for more equitable human–nature relationships, Le Guin through the association of planetary symbiosis with a cooperative alien society and McKenna via the figure of Gaia as ‘planetary Other’ with the capacity to dissolve ‘steep walls of cultural inflexibility’. Yet they differ in how they position psychedelics as delivering access to these visions of symbiotic partnership. Comparing Le Guin’s and McKenna’s visions of psychedelic ecology reveals some of the tensions that tie psychedelics to visions of ecological systems, humanism, and technology in the late twentieth century—and the association of psychedelics as such with both post- and ultra-human futures.