Each time I would get high, I experienced more and more connectedness to life.
I experienced empathy in deeper ways than I ever had, and this followed through even
to when I was sober.
It culminated in an arguably bad trip, where I experienced the life of a factory-caged
creature who never saw sunlight or socialized for its whole life.
That experience played a large part in going vegan for me, which happened the next week.
I stopped eating meat while on a mushroom trip.
I was eating chicken and it tasted like ash and death, and I felt an omniscient presence
that wanted me to stop, and so I decided that moment to stop eating meat.
That was 14 years ago.
I became vegan a few months later just as a logical next step.
I was confronted with my guilt for eating animals during a psychedelic experience.
I didn't immediately go vegan though.
I continued to consume animal products until about five months later when I came across
Earthling Ed on YouTube, and I decided to go vegan overnight.
While my decision did come a while after having that psychedelic experience, I do think it
played a major role.
I don't know when or if I would have gone vegan had I not had that experience.
I watched the Unity documentary on LSD in 2020, the part where it says,
When you look in an animal's eyes, you can see that they love their life.
They love their life to the same degree that you love your own.
I started crying with how beautiful it was.
Ever since then, I was vegan.
I found the hopeful message of Unity to be more personally inspiring than Earthlings
had been.
When taking LSD, I feel that veganism is 100% the way to go.
It helped me not only stay vegan for the rest of my life, but also to be even more active
to help nature and animals.
So yeah, the feeling of compassion is real.
I mean, LSD was banned for a reason in the 60s and 70s.
It got banned because people started taking LSD and stopped supporting the Vietnam War.
Of course there were more reasons, but you know.
So I'd say LSD and psychedelics will make you rethink your actions as well as make you
feel compassion, which then leads you to be more open to veganism, or at least against
any kind of violence.
Welcome to the Vegan Report.
My name is Ryan and today we are going to talk about psychedelics and connecting with
nature.
For years, I have been hearing stories of people taking psychedelics and being transformed
by the experience, overcoming depression or an addiction, overcoming PTSD, stimulating
their creativity, and more to the point of this podcast, gaining a sense of connectiveness
with nature, a higher level of empathy towards others, including animals, and even a willingness
to become vegan.
When I hear such stories, I cannot help but think, maybe psychedelics are the powerful
ally that the vegan movement needs.
Maybe we should fight for them to become legal and more readily available as they might provoke
the cultural reset we need to overcome speciesism.
To discuss this topic, I have with me Ellen Polanan.
She is the co-author of one of the only studies out there examining the link between the use
of psychedelics and how we treat animals.
The study is titled Classic Psychedelics and Human-Animal Relations, and you can find a
link to the study in the description below.
But Ellen is more than a researcher, many of you know her as Kelly, a talented musician
and singer, in the background of the real life testimonies you heard in the introduction
of the episode was playing Crane's, one of her songs.
Again, visit the description below to access all of Kelly's music.
Ellen welcome to the show, thank you so much for being here.
Thank you so much for having me.
So I actually don't know much about psychedelics, I never had a psychedelic experience, so my
first question for you is what are psychedelics?
I must just say before we start that if you would have said to me like 10 years ago that
I would be on a podcast talking about psychedelics, I would have laughed in your face because
I am not an expert on psychedelics.
I am an expert on what I call being annoying, which means that I tend to place myself in
rooms and ask questions, shouldn't we look at this?
And that is what happened also with my colleagues who are very knowledgeable in psychedelics
and that were so kindly inviting me to the discussion and created the study with me where
we looked at human relations and psychedelics.
So what I really did in this study was to kind of post that question.
We knew that previous studies have looked at psychedelics and nature relatedness and
there was really a gap there.
Why?
Because of the testimonies that you shared before, we kind of talked about it but it
hadn't really been studied before.
So that was kind of an insight that we should probably look at this as well because as many
of us know, human relationships with animals has fundamentally changed the surface of our
planet in a negative way due to how we treat them and how we imprison billions of them.
So a kind of important thing to ask ourselves is how do we change this and what kind of
interventions could we use?
And that's where psychedelics come in.
So psychedelics, today when I kind of historically emailed my colleague, I'm going to talk about
psychedelics today.
What should I say?
I don't know if I remember anything.
But then he kind of reminded me, like, you know, you wrote this article, so you know,
but if you want to know a fun fact, the word psychedelics come from a Greek, has Greek
roots and that stems from kind of being something mind revealing.
And that is something that we associate with psychedelics kind of being mind revealing.
So from what I've come to learn, what is included in the word psychedelics is still debatable
within the scientific community.
But in our article, we refer to kind of classic psychedelics, which is a group of psychoactive
drugs that can produce changes in perception, mood and cognitive processes in different
ways.
So in daily terms, that can mean, you know, magic mushrooms or GMT, which is the primary
ingredient in ayahuasca.
So kind of the ingredients that we know alter our perceptions of reality and our place in
reality.
So I would say that that is what psychedelics mean.
And we can talk about, and that is probably what we're going to talk about in this context,
those famous psychoactive ingredients that alter, can alter the way we experience life.
I like the fact that you bring the animal rights agenda to your work and use your perspective
to ask pertinent questions about important topics.
What has been, you know, what have you studied in university?
What are your expertise in terms of, you know, your place in that study and your role?
I think I've been quite of a hedonist when it comes to studying.
I've made my own programs.
I first I did a bachelor's program in political science, but I kind of shaped my own program
and the courses.
I can say like this, that everything I have studied on university has always been with
the kind of animal perspectives in the back of my mind.
Like how could I use these tools, these research tools or methods or mindsets to carry forth
the importance of altering our relationship to animals for the better in a positive way
and show the positive consequences that come from that positive transition.
So for instance, when I studied public science, I saw the need to kind of, okay, how could
we see animals as members of society, even if, for instance, political parties that are
based on animal rights often get ridiculed.
You can't get kittens to vote.
I mean, duh.
But how could we make sure that animals are included in the decision-making processes
in a rightful way when the decisions really impact their lives?
So more about really the rights side of it.
So how can we make decisions that really impact animals' lives and not really try to even
have them present in the room or have somebody that speaks for them in the room?
And how could that be called a democratic process if we do not do so?
So those kinds of questions.
And also I studied environmental law and philosophy and noticed how easily those classical moral
philosophers divide between body and mind and logic and feeling.
And those kind of things that are just kind of boring and untrue.
So I kind of had that as a perspective with me all along.
And it made it quite fun as well, because even if I studied the most really not my cup
of tea courses with whatever that might be, I could always think about how could I use
these processes to carry forth animal rights or that kind of perspective.
So it kind of helped me as well to go through different phases in life.
And I also wrote my bachelor's thesis on a kind of I did a discourse analysis of meat
consumption in relation to climate change and how that was discussed in the Swedish
politics.
And that was over 10 years ago.
And unfortunately, I don't see a lot of changes in that area.
And then I studied public health and learned about quantitative methods, which was horrific,
because it was a bit scary to sit there with a computer and doing all these kinds of statistical
analysis.
But that was really insightful as well to be able to look at research and say, OK, how
could I criticize this or how could this be a sane argument?
Because there is so much misinformation out there as well.
And it's really important to try to get the tools, as much tools as possible, to kind
of scrutinize the research out there in its biases.
And I tried to do that with my own research as well.
Why didn't this could not be true or closer to truth or whatever?
We all know there are a lot of research out there saying this and that about plant-based
diets and this and that about everything.
So just learning about these different methods and the different ways that we calculate what
is closest to the truth can be very fruitful in realizing, aha, this is what research means
and this is how research can be used in different ways.
And in those public health classes, I learned a lot about what was not being said.
That is usually the thing that has taught me the most in every academic setting I've
been in and also in every research setting I've been in is that there's also something
that we learn from what is not being said.
So in the public health class, it was we never talked about plant-based diets.
We didn't talk about the relationship between climate change and environmental destruction,
animal exploitation and human health.
We didn't talk about pandemics.
I read that on the site because I found that very important and a very important argument
to transition from the way we are living now to a way that at least minimizes the risk
of future pandemics and epidemics.
So really in the heart of everything that I've done academically has always been just
a wish to learn more about the world and how I can see it in different ways and how I can
learn from that and to bring that into the conversations I have.
And I think animal rights have been a very central part in that in the decisions I've
made and it's been joyful.
We usually talk about the things we have to give up when we talk about animal rights,
but I do think it's been just joyful to have that as perspective.
It's really helped me to kind of find the passion and motivation to go through those
big books.
I want to go back to your study and some of the words that you have used in that study
that maybe most listeners would not be familiar with.
And I want to take the time to maybe define them.
So talking about psychedelics, you talk about something called ego dissolution.
So what is ego dissolution?
It has been found in studies on psychedelic use and it can really be said to be a loss
of self-identity, your boundaries, the boundaries between yourself and your surroundings is
decreased or absent.
It's a feeling of being that is different from the ones that we might know now as the
ego that here is where I begin, there is where my surroundings begin.
So it's really about dissolving that boundary, a feeling of that boundary being dissolved.
And it's a really interesting term.
I found it interesting because it made me think about how human exceptionalism is such
a common theme in our culture and especially in Western culture, colonial culture.
Sorry, Ellen, can you define that?
Because in vegan circles, we hear about speciesism, but we don't hear about human exceptionalism
that often.
Well, it's really linking terms because you can't really have speciesism without human
exceptionalism in a way because speciesism is really pushing your species in front of
other species and thinking that you're superior.
And that could not really be done without human exceptionalism, believing that, well,
we are the exception.
And I've been in very, very, well, very, no, that's not really an exaggeration.
I've been in many rooms, scientific rooms as well, with brilliant minds.
But when it comes to human animal relations or the way we relate to each other, there
is almost an ideological feeling in the room that, well, this is established.
The human exceptionalism is established.
Animals don't have culture.
Animals don't have languages.
Animals don't have this.
And usually it is used in a way to describe humanity and the way we humans work.
And in many instances, it's very, very wrong, according to the research that we know.
So human exceptionalism is a really sociocultural phenomenon that we construct to make it easier
to place ourselves above other species.
Well, another question I'm dying to ask.
Why is the research that we have currently on animals describing them as having personalities
and feelings and being complex creatures?
Why is it not making any impact on the way we think about them?
And I will go as far as to talk about Darwin.
Why Darwin's discovery of natural selection have not completely and radically changed
our interactions with the natural world, with the rest of the animal kingdom.
He's the one who said, and I think you quote him or paraphrase him in the study or in one
of your interviews, but he's the one who said the difference between humans and animals
is a difference of degrees and not of kind or nature.
So why is it not making an impact on the way we think about the world?
Wow.
If we knew that.
I believe that in our, and I think we will come back to this, but I think that the way
that we currently, I think that the way I feel, and I think many others feel like that,
who fights for animal rights or who is part of the ongoing battle, so to say, is trying
to see how could I reach this individual or how could I change this and that.
And I think in that insight in wow, how much we could change with just changing the way
people eat, for instance, what a tremendous effect and impact that might have.
So we focus on the individual and reaching that individual, but I think that is a very
important effort, but I do think that sometimes we forget the powerful and resourceful industries
that are behind these habits that make up our lives and the enormous amounts of propaganda
that has been fed to us and is continuously being fed and that a lot of the decisions
that have made a horrendous impact on earth and on public health and on animal health,
those decisions have been made in rooms that are closed and that are not made by politicians,
but in boards, in economic institutions and businesses.
So while I think that a lot of frustration comes from, oh, we could do so much by just
changing how individuals think about this and that, I think that we should also remember
that the frustration that some of us carry might also be directed to the people in power.
Why didn't you have our interest in mind?
Because we're normalizing talking about this when it comes to the tobacco industry, but
we should normalize talking about this when it comes to all industries because too many
free cards have been handed out at the expense of our planet and public health.
And I think that is important to remember.
And I think when we talk about, for instance, climate change and environmental exploitation,
the tendency and the daily rhetoric is that it's an external problem that can be fixed
through technology.
But I do think that many of us who knows the consequences of technology, which means that
the industries are more efficient, which creates a lot of suffering.
So we understand the kind of negative sides of technological innovations if it doesn't
come with inner dimensions of change.
So I think when we talk about climate change, when we talk about animal rights, when we
talk about human rights, when we talk about everything that has to do with rights, we're
talking about attitudes.
We're talking about our internal lives that we manifest on a daily basis.
And that can be really hard to change, but we are social animals.
We are.
And I think that one small transition can create, can do something, can create a domino
effect.
So I do think that there is a place for hope, but I do think that we also need to remind
ourselves that years and years of misinformation and propaganda is behind these daily habits
of individuals.
And we need interventions and we need people who want this to change and who wants to put
our health before profit.
And that is also a way to go about it to kind of win people over because when we cause the
suffering of billions of animals, we're not putting human health first.
Our health is always interconnected.
We saw that in the pandemic.
So we need to alter that perception and ego dissolution.
It can be a way to do that because it can remind people that the boundaries that we
have socially and culturally created towards the outside world is not really the way the
world works.
It's not really the way the world works.
And the pandemic was a harsh reminder, but other things can be a harsh reminder as well
when the climate starts to change around us or as in my personal experience, the forest
in my home village is being turned into clear cuts and I'm very personally affected by this.
We are reminded that we know this.
We know that we are interconnected with the world around us, even if we are fed with the
idea that there is a separation going on.
Pets can remind us about this.
There's so many reminders.
And I think we also write about that in the article about these kind of reminders in our
daily lives and in the context where we are that can remind us about this interconnection.
It can also feed us with separation.
I think one important thing to hold on to is to find these moments of interconnection
to guide us forward because I think that is the closest to reality that will ever come
as humans.
So if I understand well, ego dissolution is about finding back that connection with your
environment.
Basically that sense that you are separate from the world disappears.
I think that ego dissolution is a phenomenon where you feel that that boundary is dissolving.
I don't think and it has been linked to different measurements, if I'm not wrong.
I think they have seen that it has been associated with well-being, for instance, and positive
outcomes.
But I'm hesitant to say that ego dissolution is the way to go.
But I think it's an interesting phenomenon.
And particularly because we are so trained to rather feel the opposite, to feel a separation.
So that was what kind of sucked me into the concept.
Oh, that's intriguing.
It's something I love breaking barriers.
So when I heard that, I was like, oh, you have my attention, ego dissolution.
But yeah, so yeah.
Well that's why I think that psychedelics are an interesting prospect for activists,
because I'm not sure you can reach that goal of connecting people with nature just by the
Socratic method of stopping people in the streets and debating them about veganism.
Like we see it with the cube of truth.
I think there are as many ways as there are people.
I think you can reach people in many, many different ways.
I think we can all do it in our own way just by being who we are in the context that we
are.
I think one of the most important insights that I got from the psychedelic study was
that context is so important.
Context and mindset.
It would also be a bit risky to say that psychedelic would act as a kind of quick fix, because
I know that we humans, we tend to also in our culture, we tend to look at, oh, quick
fix.
How can I quick fix this?
And that is also a risk that we culturally appropriate, that we exploit just to get to
that lesson that we need to learn to move forward.
I think we need to also sit in the discomfort of what has been done and how can we do better
and create contexts that really help us see the positive impacts of human-animal nature
relations.
For instance, after psychedelic experience, people are very vulnerable to stimuli.
What happens if you go on a spiritual ego-dissolving journey or whatever we should call it, and
then you come back into your daily life and you're still met with the individualized pieces
of products that animals represent in the store, for instance?
What happens when you're constantly fed with that kind of division again and that kind
of culture again?
It's really about context, I believe.
If you're open to it in the beginning or if you have a community where that kind of way
of looking at animals is more accessible and possible.
I do think context is really the key in this study as well, that just enabling for other
relationships with animals that are more positive and less de-individualized and more nuanced
could really do something.
If you add psychedelics in there, wow, the results might be very fascinating and very
effective.
But also if you add music in there or if you add whatever ingredient in that context, who
knows?
We could have made ourselves a transformative community just by creating those kind of ingredients.
Of course, I'm thinking about the 1960s and 70s and how psychedelics were used and
what was the impact on the society of that time.
It's fascinating.
There was an explosion of culture and art and music.
Some of the best singers we can think of were born from that era.
Also we get stories of scientists who have used psychedelics from that time to make breakthroughs.
We have a model of what society looked like with a more accessible use of psychedelics.
Yeah, that's super interesting.
That was the introduction of an article I read.
I remember when I was writing the article, it was about that and the music and the pro-environmentalism
that was occurring at the same time was the psychedelic movement and the environmental
movement went alongside.
That's really interesting for sure.
Yes, I have the image of hippies in mind.
I want to quickly go back to the hostile forces, to those ideas.
When you said that you studied environmental science, I think, environmental law, and in
the context of your studies, there was no mention of pandemics.
I thought about the risk that factory farming poses on public health in terms of zoonotic
diseases.
Then I thought, okay, do you believe that academic institutions that you visited from
which you got your education were in a way captured by the agriculture industry or big
corporation or I don't want to get conspirational here, but I want to ask you that question
still.
I'm going to answer that by saying something that has nothing to do with it.
When I graduated from upper secondary school, which also was a political science focused
program, I said to my teacher that I wanted to focus on animal rights in going forward
to the university.
She was like, oh, that's such a shame.
You were so good at human rights.
I think that is still the way that most people live their lives because that is the way that
we are being taught from day one to make that separation.
Really what many, many researchers before me have been saying for a long time, not just
researchers but poets and artists, is that that is really not true.
That is not the way we live our lives.
But it's still very present because I think that what happens in academia, and I don't
think it's a willful ignorance.
I don't think so.
I think it's just because we have created academia in a way that makes it very accessible
in a way that we make these boxes and this is what we should learn and this is how reality
looks like.
That is one purpose of research, to make it easier to categorize and to do all these things.
But I do think that issues that have to do with animal rights have been drowned a bit.
It has been hard to reach the surface for many different reasons.
But I can't really, I do think it's just cultural.
I do think that we are trained to say, we will deal with that later.
We haven't figured this thing out yet, so we will deal with that later.
Or it's not as relevant as talking about tobacco and alcohol, for instance, when it came to
the public health program, which in a way is really important to talk about.
But it's also important to talk about diets and the way that animal exploitation is really
harmful to all of us and especially for the often marginalized communities living close
by or for the people working within these horrible institutions that suffer, many suffer
from PTSD, for instance.
So I think it's still seen as a bit of a marginalized or very, very specific subject, animal rights
or things that has to do with animals, when it really is just ingrained in our lives in
most things that we talk about.
A lot of things we have in our homes are made from animals.
We don't even think about it or people who live, we can think about it.
But normally we don't stop and go, wait, this candle, is that?
And I've worked because I was also part of a research project that looked at the pandemic
and its consequences and I was part of a team where I again said, well, what about the way
we treat animals and the reason why we have a pandemic?
Why aren't we talking about that?
And my colleagues said, here, here, that is what we want to look at.
So we did that.
And we collaborated with one of the founders of One Health in Sweden.
And One Health is a concept that looks at the interconnectedness in health between humans,
animals and the environment.
And he told me that years before the COVID-19 pandemic, I don't remember if it was one year
or if it was a time before the pandemic arrived to Sweden, that he wanted to have a seminar
to politicians talking about the risks of a pandemic happening linked to the way we
treat animals.
And he has been specializing in bird flu and things like that.
But he really wanted to have a seminar to kind of inform politicians about the risks
of future pandemics, which he found to be bound to happen due to the way that the world
is functioning right now.
And there was not a lot of interest.
And he even had a book about pandemics that was completely covered in dust there on the
bookshelf.
And then the pandemic happened and the interest just skyrocketed.
And that is kind of an example of how I think these voices have always, the voices of resistance
have always been there.
It's just very hard for them to be heard because there are so many other things that are
pushed forward to be prioritized.
And especially in a world where we are trained to not see that connection, it's not seen
as the most important subjects to look at because, well, I do think it's not a willful
act.
I do just think that it is just the way the world works because of how we've been trained
to think.
And sadly, in institutions where great minds are, we all have blind spots.
I have my blind spots, we all have them.
And they are more easy to have when we're trained to walk with the cognitive dissonance
all day long.
You make the point in, I think, the introduction of the study that people who have a sensitivity
towards animals, who care about animal rights, are also people who are less likely to be
criminals, to be intolerant, to be abusive.
And the opposite is true when we think about animal abusers.
There's this image, a cliche of the murderer, the serial killer, then, was torturing animals
during his childhood.
And when we talk about sexism, who are the first to kill and abuse animals?
And so many, for instance, dogs in shelters will be afraid of human men and will only
interact with human females.
And I feel like it's just there.
People are conscious of it, but they're just not making the connection.
They're not able to step beyond that cognitive dissonance you're talking about.
The last push is not there.
So yeah.
In that type of research, I think I've read a lot of Aisha Akhtar's work, and I must say
that I really recommend everyone reading her work, because she talks a lot about, especially
from a public health view, how human rights are connected to animal rights and those relations
that you were talking about, for instance, through abuse and violence.
And how I've come to think of it is that the key element in all this, I think, is the role
of dehumanization or the de-individualization.
If you animalize someone, which we do with animals, but we also do with other groups
of people, it's easier to not see how these individuals, how you can inflict pain in these
individuals, or how if something happens to their bodies or violence or whatever, you
kind of discredit or you ignore the sensations that these individuals can have.
So I think the key element in this is dehumanization and how those processes work.
And cognitive dissonance is also a coping mechanism.
So if your values and your actions, they conflict what to do.
And parts of that answer can be that, well, if that individual that I'm doing this to
is not really an individual, then this gap doesn't exist anymore.
So in our very high human intelligence, we have a lot of ways to rationalize bad behavior
or rationalize things to ourselves to make us feel better.
And I do think an important part of moving forward is to get the tools to look at ourselves
and sit in that discomfort and just be, okay, what have I been taught and what have I learned?
And do I have dehumanizing tendencies or do I have blind spots or whatever?
And I do think that doing that as a society and as a community could be really healing
and could be really transformative.
Continuing on, by the way, the term de-individualizing, I love it.
One of my new favorite terms now.
Another term you used in the study and that I want you to define is something you call
the biophilia hypothesis.
So what is that about?
Well, that is really a term that emphasizes the human innate need to connect with the
natural world.
And has been suggested, inspired by that term, that nature connectedness, to feel connected
with nature is a human need even.
So it's really a term that wants to say that we have a need to connect with the natural
world.
And this need might not only be physical, but also spiritual.
And it can have many, it can have nuances to it.
So it can also be a very spiritual term and kind of psychological term as well.
And as we've talked about, I do think that there's something that we experience, even
though I know you said that we've kind of built away a lot of nature and we kind of
created a human world in a sense.
I think just going on the subway in town can be a really good reminder that you cannot
build away nature in a way.
Nature is always there.
You can just alter the way nature looks like.
But we never live in human worlds.
We always live in interconnected worlds with a multi-species world with nature.
And just like standing on the subway and the pigeon walks in and you're like, okay, there
you are.
How nice, how lovely.
And you can join us and then the pigeon, the group of pigeons stand there for a couple
of stops and then they just walk out.
And I think those instances are lovely reminders of that we can try with humans.
And I don't think that is a goal.
I think that is a horrible goal, but we can try to kind of build our human world.
But the world would just remind us like, hello, here I am.
And I find that just wonderful.
And I think during the pandemic, the biophilia hypothesis was probably experienced by a lot
of people.
So for instance, people who couldn't...
In Sweden, we had the fortune to not be as restricted in our movements.
So we could go outside, for instance.
And a lot of us went to the forest to reflect and to help us distress and to mirror ourselves
in another kind of a more...
A reality that is more still and peaceful.
And also for the people who had to be inside, research has shown that if they had a tree
they could look at, it helped them to kind of establish this connection to the natural
world anyway and feel less isolated.
And all those research says, showing that if you have a tree outside of your hospital
window, it helps you feel faster.
And all of these things, I think really just pinpoint what that hypothesis is trying to
say that we have this innate need, even if we have created somewhat a culture that is
based upon this human exceptionalism and based on this kind of separation of nature and culture
and animals and humans, that we have this need.
And when we really realize that, I think we need to in these times, we need to realize
that the time to really act on this need is now because we are doing so much to this planet
that we will regret and that will have consequences for also our health, for instance, deforestation
and environmental degradation and all of these things.
I think I've read a Danish interview or what it was that inspired me to write my lyrics
for O and it was that he had been biking with his son and he had not been experiencing the
insects in the same way that he had summers before.
Just these minor changes in the way we experience life when these change, we will miss the interactions
we had with other animals.
We will miss it because it is information that we receive and that make up our lives,
but we take them for granted.
So when the birds silence, we will know and we will miss it.
So I do think that it's time to act on this kind of thesis now more than ever.
By the way, oh, my favorite song of yours.
I'm just realizing in how much of a mess we are talking with you.
Oh no.
No, in the sense of how chaotic and nonsensical our situation is.
Because, yes, I agree that we feel a need to connect with nature.
I absolutely agree with the biophilia hypothesis, the premise of that theory.
But you talked about the pandemic and how people went hiking a lot.
And that is something we also experience in Canada.
People instead of going to Southern America, where they usually go for vacation, went and
visited our national parks.
But then there was a big scandal about how the national park were getting lots of garbage
and nature was getting destroyed and trees were being cut and it started lots of fires.
And from an individual perspective, we want to live near a forest or near a park or a
garden and our houses that are near green zones are worth more on the market.
But if we see a spider in the kitchen or we get all crazy and we want to kill it and we
don't like mosquitoes and we're intolerant of any kind of...
Like if it's too sunny, we complain.
If there's too much rain, we start to complain.
We're always complaining about nature.
And so there is that and then there's the whole aspect of, like you mentioned, like
we talked before, we understand that there is a link between us and the natural world,
that we are part of the animal kingdom.
We have so much data and studies backing up the fact that animals are sentient.
But then we have this big cognitive dissonance and we're not able to take the leap.
And so I find myself being in wonder of how much, again, nonsensical our attitude and
behaviors are.
Yeah, it's so interesting what you're saying because that is one of the things that I think
you realize when you read human animal studies or attitudes to animals, that they can be
so contra-intuitive and just conflicting in themselves, that they can be very ambivalent
and why do we eat that animal and not this, and very culturally linked just to habit or
class or status or whatever.
And it's so interesting what you said with the kind of opposite to having a need for
nature, that the kind of the fear of nature, which is really interesting now when we talk
about the pandemic, because that was one of the risks that we saw when we did explore
the consequences of the pandemic in relation to human animal nature relations is that in
the word that we use, or not we, but the governments use or doctors use or whatever, animals and
nature can be seen as threats to human health.
And how does that alter our willingness to protect animals and nature if they are a threat
to us?
And that is a problem because usually when an animal poses a threat to us, for instance,
if a bat population has a disease that can be transmitted to humans, the standard is,
oh, we should kill all the bats.
But maybe the problem why the infection was easily transmitted to us in the first place
was because we destroyed the habitat of the bats.
So what we really should do is that we should protect bats.
And in today's world, that can be very counterintuitive also because of the relations that we created
with animals that are very based on anthropocentric means and what is good for us humans and animals
being a function to us humans.
Why should we protect something that wants to kill us?
So I really see an importance here in getting the message out to people.
And a more nuanced way of seeing our relationship to animals means, okay, the risk exists, but
why?
And if we think about the animal perspective and the animal life, a suitable measure should
not be to kill all the individuals.
It might be to protect its habitat and make sure that they have a space where they can
be.
So we tend to see, when we talk about fear and we talk about those kinds of things, and
it's a valid fear because infectious diseases are increasing in this world, we usually tend
to double punish the animals that have these infections and not maybe think about ourselves
as the problem.
Usually we are the problem because we've built away their natural environments and that means
that they live closer to us.
So I do think that it's really important, especially after the pandemic, where there
is a risk that we can talk about animals as a risk to human health and also nature as
risks to human health, to really understand that we can create a kind of movement that
shows politicians or decision makers that we are not okay with calling as an option
for treating this problem because we as a community or whatever, we want to create buffer
zones that decreases the risk of transmission and that can mean keeping that forest intact,
for instance, or maybe not building houses where bats live, for instance.
So I think the fear that we feel towards animals, especially here in the Western world, especially
in Sweden, where we have been quite fortunate with diseases and things like that, is that
it has...
Oh, they can't come here.
We've had the problem with wild boars and in Norway, they just killed everyone off.
And here in Sweden, they tried to restrict the area in which the disease is.
But also here, we have a very active forest industry that clear cuts a lot of natural
areas where the animals live.
So I do think that that fear that animals live where we live and that fear might guide
us to something.
It might guide us to, yes, because we are not letting them have their space.
I think just creating a more positive relationship with animals also come with...
Like in every healthy relationship, it comes with knowing when do I have to give you space?
How can I create a safe space for you and I to function?
I do think we need to see it more as a personal relationship to understand, but it takes of
us to transform.
So it was really interesting what you said, because a lot of what I've been reading recently
is about that fear messaging or risk messaging and the negative consequences that might come
from that.
Yeah.
Thanks.
Well, also, I would be remiss not to mention how in the vegan community, but also everywhere,
the word nature and natural comes with a positive perception.
So we want natural products and it's not very scientific because in a way, everything is
natural.
What do you mean by this is natural?
What do you make of the use or misuse of the term natural to sell products, to cast a positive
light on something?
It has become kind of an accessory for capitalism and for big corporations.
Yes.
For sure.
It is kind of a rabbit hole, isn't it?
Or natural.
It throws you out.
When you phrased that question, I was like, wow, that could be an endless or just like
a 24-hour discussion just about the world natural and how it's so ingrained in so many
things.
Well, I was also thinking of that ad.
I don't know if you watched that ad of Apple inviting Mother Nature to their headquarters.
You have Tim Cook, who's the CEO of Apple, talking with Mother Nature about how Apple
is great and has a great relationship with nature and is environmentally friendly.
Mother Nature congratulates them for being a wonderful, environmentally friendly company,
which they are not.
They are absolutely not.
That sounds super surrealistic.
That sounds so surreal.
I haven't heard of it.
I just think about it because now I'm very active in the kind of the forest movement
here in Sweden trying to come by clear cuts.
I'm very into that area right now.
That might be why I'm constantly moving in that direction.
The word natural is a very problematic term there as well because a forest is seen as
something that is renewable, which in a sense, okay, understandable.
You can cut down a tree and it grows up again, but then you tend to miss the fact that a
forest comes with an ecosystem, comes with something that has been growing and living
and developing there for hundreds and hundreds of years, and that is now renewable.
There's a really ongoing trend here in Sweden, I think all over the world, that Sweden wants
to pose itself as a very, very environmentally friendly country with, we have these solutions
for this.
It's a commercial on TV that you can replace everything with trees, with wood.
They just walk around with everything is made from a tree and then you just think, okay,
there the old growth forest went like this because we barely have anything left.
What's left is fields of trees of production, which is not a forest.
It's the typical way that we are trained to think as consumers or as citizens that we
are, I'm going to use one of your new favorite terms now, de-individualizing.
We are also de-spiritualizing places and individuals and not seeing the forest for its arrays of
relationships and networks and things that we have barely started to care about and explore
that are being destroyed due to the forest industry.
We are just learning to see the trees.
There's one tree, there's a second tree, and we're not really being trained to see the
relationship these trees have with each other and all the species that live there and everything
that has been growing and et cetera, et cetera.
This is another example of when we are trained to just commodify life into product.
When we look at a product and we see, oh, natural, it's made out of trees from blah,
blah, blah, it's certified.
The more I learn, the more disappointed I get in these labels.
I get sad because I wish they were true.
I wish that the certifying sustainable forestry, this notepad was made from a certified sustainable
forestry and I know what that means.
I've seen the clear cuts.
It's not sustainable.
It really needs to happen something and I think we need to demand as consumers, unfortunately,
that's the way the economy works.
We need to demand that for more transparency within the industry.
I mean, to use natural, but to use harvested meat, just to use these terms that makes us
forget that these animals were born, raised, and killed in these industries, for instance,
it's a very, very... It can be an efficient way to make us forget where things come from.
That products, that resources were taken to create something, even if it's natural or
more sustainable, it still took something for that product to end up there.
It's not a very popular view, especially not in a capitalist society, but to use less perhaps.
I don't think we will save the world by driving electric cars.
I'm sorry.
I don't think so, but I think that is what is more profitable for the system that we
live in, but it's not better for us.
Absolutely not.
But yeah, the word natural can be a very efficient label, for sure.
Clean also, clean, green, what else?
Non-gibble, whatever, everything, every label is... It's hard to be a consumer these days.
It's really hard.
That's why we need to put pressure on governments and companies, because individuals can do
a lot of work, but it's impossible to do all the work.
I guess they are literally capitalizing on our bio-failure, our needs to be close to
nature.
Yeah, sure.
Sure.
They have recognized that, and instead of making reforms in culture, they instead wanted
to use it to make profits for their company.
Yeah.
Instead of doing better, and instead of doing things that actually is positive for that
term, they just say, we know you care about this, but you should also not care about it.
Yes, it's a bit psychopathic.
If I had to go to the essence of your study, I get the sense that you consider psychedelics
as maybe a way to get clarity in the middle of this confusion and those lies and this
senselessness, clarity about our place in the world and about who we are.
It goes against cultural norms and understandings of psychedelics, because we believe psychedelics,
I think most people, to be something akin to alcohol, it makes you confused and it makes
you lose your mind.
You're not a serious person if you take psychedelics, but instead you're making the point that, no,
this will bring us clarity or this might bring us clarity.
Yeah.
I would perhaps say that psychedelics should be further explored, because this is just
the beginning.
We don't know enough to really say anything else than that, huh, we found an association.
This might be worthy of further investigation, really, if it might be an intervention to
alter perceptions and alter human animal relations also in a long lasting way, because we don't
have any longitudinal data.
We don't have any long-term data, so we don't really know.
We just know what the participants recall.
It can be also a bit of a self-reporting bias there, that people want to feel connected.
We really need to see more studies that show, okay, so people feel an increased connection,
but does that translate into the way they live their lives in long term and how they
behave after a while?
We don't really know.
We did see some associations with animal solidarity and also with, what was it, speciesism, lower
speciesism or negative effects with speciesism.
We did see associations that showed that, okay, it can alter human animal relations,
but again, what my colleagues really want to emphasize as well, and I know they want
to, so I have to emphasize it again, is that, and I believe this as well, it is really context
dependent.
Previous studies have seen that, for instance, if people do psychedelics in nature, that
can increase their relatedness to nature because it's made in a nature setting, et cetera,
in a more wild or non-human setting.
Nature is everywhere.
I think the core of the article is really, again, I think a lot can be seen in what we
can say.
I think it's really interesting that we don't have enough answers about this, even despite
the fact that it is so important to change these relations that we have with animals
because they do really alter the world and health and everything, and a lot of things.
How can we not, to this day, have more studies on interventions that can alter these relations?
How can we not know more how we can efficiently try to transform these relationships into
a more positive one?
I think that is the most fundamental question in all of this, and that the psychedelic study,
I love discussions and articles.
I do love the discussions, and I do like the discussion in this article because there we
can talk about, okay, ego dissolution, but not lifetime classic psychedelic use was positively
associated with the desire to help animals.
What can that mean?
That might mean that it has something to do with that our coping or defense mechanisms,
for instance, cognitive dissonance, is decreased because our ego, our ego's, our boundaries
are dissolving, and we are not as inclined to have these win and lose mentality and this
kind of notion of human exceptionalism.
We don't lose our humanness by seeing that animals have their own lives, for instance,
and their own personalities, for instance.
We can re-individualize animals again because it doesn't make us less of who we are.
Maybe we don't know, but that is one of the things that we talk about in the discussion
that I really like is how can psychedelics, as one of many interventions, help us to instead
see the win-win situations in improving our relationship with animals and having enriched
and respectful relationship with animals and nature.
Another thing that I find really puzzling with the study and just by studying human
behavior and attitudes is that our connection with nature, what does that mean?
It can mean a lot of things.
We haven't really pinpointed what that means to every individual who has answered the survey.
It can mean to feel connected, but what does it mean, as I said, with how you live your
life or in some ways connection can be experienced as also a separation.
I feel a connection with nature, but I'm not part of nature.
How does that work?
I'm very fascinated with these kind of mindsets that we carry and how they translate into
the world and how interventions such as psychedelics can help us get insight into these cognitive
processes that we all carry because it's very fascinating.
They seem complex.
That is my takeaway from the article.
I do hope that more research will show more long-term answers.
Blogitudinal studies would be amazing and also looking at other interventions other
than psychedelics, maybe just community-based also interventions would be amazing just because
we do think that the context and setting is so important.
What happens when we mix all these ingredients?
Could that alter people's mindsets?
Could that make people feel like the threshold to change their behaviors is lower, is easier,
more accessible?
That is really the question that I had and I carry forth in this article, those kind
of questions.
I'm happy you're making that point because just from anecdotes, I know that there are
plenty of people out there who are big fans of psychedelics.
Psychedelics have made a great impact, transformative impact in their lives, but they are the opposite
of a vegan or an environmentalist in a way.
I'm thinking here about Joe Rogan.
We're recording a podcast.
The king of podcasting is of course Joe Rogan and he is infamous for being against vegans
and against eating a plant-based diet.
He thinks it's unhealthy and he's all about hunting.
Yet at the same time, he talks a lot about psychedelics and how that transformed him
and made him more receptive to the world, more empathic.
He goes on and on about the importance of psychedelics in his life.
He talks about it as something spiritual.
It's hard to understand how can someone go through such a profound experience and still
finds sadistic pleasure in hunting, killing, and eating animals.
That is something that we did discuss.
Some research suggests that you can also strengthen the connections already existing or your mindset
is very important when you go through this experience.
Even if you can feel a sense of dissolving your boundaries, again, the context seems
to be very important and also the mindset that you already carry.
As you said, maybe he had different goals.
Sometimes I think that is just typical of the way we handle things in our society.
I read an interesting article that talked about mac-mindfulness, how we kind of integrated
yoga into the Western culture.
That has also been created some kind of mindfulness practices, some kind of quick fix.
There are so many instances for you here in places like, I meditate 20 minutes a day to
get the optimal results of this.
It's still in this kind of context of production and capitalism and hustle culture and whatever.
It feels like the context is really important.
Harps and prejudice, they come with harmful things also for the people who are seen as
having more power.
It feels like the goals that you set when you have that role as people call them alpha
males or like a toxic masculinity.
You should be this and do that.
It's very restrictive as well.
I wish that his experiences might have been, oh, I can be the interconnectedness of liberation
and if I'm free and they're free and we're all free.
But no, I did this and I feel more open now so I can do these and these goals.
It feels like a way of using something to move forward and it doesn't have to mean inner
work.
That might also be a really important point that maybe the reason why you consume psychedelics
is important in the first place, just also with the context.
There are people from Western culture traveling to these small villages where they have practices
and have been doing these practices, for instance, ayahuasca for many, many, many years, hundreds
of years.
They have that rooted in their culture and their community and individuals consume it
individually and might not focus on the experience of the community, for instance.
That might be the case locally, traditionally.
What does that do with us when we still have that individual anthropocentric way of consuming
something?
Can that really then alter our minds or is the context so important that we need to invest
in the community first to create a safe space?
Those are questions I don't have the answer to, but I do think that they are very important.
I do think that when we talk about psychedelics, that cultural misappropriation and also exploitation
of these cultures are important to talk about because it's a risk due to the history of
colonialism and due to the ongoing colonialism that we are seeing.
There are many, many, many things that we could talk about in terms of this article.
Your explanation has truly helped me to understand why he behaves that way.
The mindfulness analogy speaks to me as a Buddhist.
I see the difference between the meditation that is taught by monks who have to meditate
for 10 years before having the privilege to teach meditation to students versus people
here in the West who go through a six-month certification program to be able to host meditation
classes for anyone who wants to advance or have better mental health or something like
that.
Then the meditation I have learned from monks is much more profound in its purpose, in its
intention, in its goals than the meditation we find on apps.
It truly speaks to me that difference.
It's weird how meditation is also a practice of ego dissolution, at least the way I see
meditation.
It's all about disappearing.
I find the link between that and also psychedelics interesting.
It can be really hard for individuals to...
I think it's hard in this society because it's easy to think that our value is just
related to our productivity.
The transformative processes that we do, like meditation, whenever the end goal is just
to increase our productivity, what happens?
What happens with the practice?
What happens to our experience of ourselves and things like that?
It's really context dependent.
It can be hard to lose those shackles that capitalists put on us that we are just worthy
when we're productive.
Also in these age of social media, when the doing is unfocused, it can be really hard.
It's not easy.
LR Well, there was a monk who once said, I remember,
he said, you can be a mindful assassin.
It's possible.
If you're not taking the practice as a whole, it doesn't make sense.
But yeah, here we go.
Another practice that might promote a connection with nature is music.
When I think about the history of music, I think of, for instance, the muse.
I had the experience of visiting Greece and the Greek ruins and temples.
At some point, we visited a cave at the top of a mountain and it was surrounded with forests.
We were told that this is the cave of the muse and the muse inhabits the forests surrounding
us or something like that, if I remember correctly.
But I remember very clearly being a bit surprised by it because for me, music was synonymous
with civilization and culture.
I was not expecting for arts and anything that has to do with it to inhabit a wild forest
and to be about a cave.
It's the link between a cave and music or poetry or whatever.
I don't know how many muses there are, but they're all like sent patrons of a different
art form.
I find it truly interesting.
I wanted to ask you, as a musician, has it helped you make that connection with nature?
How do you experience your art, basically?
I love this question.
I do think growing up with music because I'm brought up in a family where music was very
present and where we sang together.
My mother is a music maker and my sister also sings and dances and my dad loved music.
So he was a great appreciator of music.
I do think that it helped.
It also helped, of course, in combination with living on the countryside and living
with animals.
But I do think that music helped me because my first language was communicating through
music.
That was my first language, was music, to sing or to create sounds.
I did sing before I spoke.
So I do think that just having that relationship with a non-verbal way of communicating really
showed me that our human words are not everything that is embedded in the word communication.
It comes with a lot of things.
It comes with, and just growing up performing, it's also about body language.
Communication means so many different things.
I think music really helped me to see that and just appreciate the music of nature of
other animals and just birds singing.
I could listen for hours.
I remember when I was a kid, I was thinking, wow, that is so beautiful how they communicate.
And learning more about that helped me to dissolve the barriers between cultural and
biological diversity because I do not think that that separation is correct.
I think that whenever we are erasing biological diversity, very actual now with the mass extinction
of animals, we are also losing cultural diversity and cultural practices that we have barely
started to know more about because we have been quite into our human exceptional ideas
of culture.
There's whale singing and there's so many different ways of art.
And I think culture is also a biological function.
It's just navigating through life.
Music has helped me navigate through life.
It helps me to integrate the feelings that I have felt and the experiences that I have
and to create something with it and to share it with other people.
And it can have a soothing effect for people that might be able to reflect themselves in
music.
I think it's a way of navigating through life.
And I do think that most, if not all, other animals do need to navigate through life.
And then, of course, I can experience music in the natural, less human-made environments
as well.
For instance, with trees, like scratching and things like that.
I'm like, ah, do you hear that?
That's beautiful.
And sounds, rather.
And sometimes I sample them and I hear the music in them.
I think music is just a collection of sounds.
And I love seeing music that way because that makes me appreciate the kind of unpolished
sounds that infiltrate my compositions, no matter if I want them to or not.
It's like, oh, that squeaky thing that came into the recording.
And then I really love that squeaky sound because it's life.
Sounds just infiltrate your life.
And as a musician, I love that.
So yeah, I think that music really helped me to gain that perspective from early on.
And when I make music or when I perform, I feel very integrated.
And also when I play music, I feel that the boundaries are also dissolving.
The way you talk about meditation, I think I said when people asked me what I wanted
to be when I grew up as a kid, I would say that I wanted to be music because it was a
state of being to become music in a way that you're so integrated with all of the parts
that you are one.
So sometimes I feel that and I'm very lucky to experience that feeling.
I felt that yesterday when I was rehearsing for a gig, when I was playing violin, I felt
it afterwards.
Oh, I had that experience again when I was just completely integrated into the being.
That's a beautiful answer.
And it's not a surprising one because when I listen to your music, it's very immersive.
I feel like I'm transported by the music and the lyrics.
Do you have that goal in mind?
Do you think of the people who are going to listen to your songs when you make music or
do you just let yourself be guided by your creativity, by your muse?
Will I sound like a terrible person if I just say no?
I don't think of other people.
I do think about other people when I get cold feet before releasing music.
Like, oh my God, will they even find this as music or is it noise?
So interesting, that process as well from the creative stage of being into the scrutinizing
yourself and thinking about, you know, commercializing and the thing that is so personal to you is
a very interesting process in this day, modern day.
But no, it just comes to me, really.
I sit in front of an instrument and I think it's something that has been happening in
my subconscious and then it just comes out.
And then sometimes I do have a feeling, for instance, that something I've been thinking
about or something I've been trying to embody and then I have walked around with it.
And then when I sit down, it usually just comes and then after a while I realize, oh,
okay, this song is about this because now I'm experiencing this.
And then I try to finish it with that kind of emotion.
I say in a lot of interviews, and I think it is because I want to kind of give credit
to my roots that I have Swedish roots.
I also have Finnish Karelian roots and Karelian is an endangered culture.
And there's a practice in Karelian culture that is lamentation and lamentation is, you
know, it practices all over the world.
But in Kareli, it is a female-led tradition.
And historically, it was often an older woman who was present at different occasions.
It could be happy occasions like a wedding or it could be sad, like a funeral.
And the mission of the lamenter was to help people to channel all their emotions in a
transition.
And that is something that has really inspired me in my personal life, but also in my artistry
that I think that music has that role in our lives, again, navigating through life, but
also helping us to feel all the emotions at the same time.
Because usually it's like, is it a happy song?
Is it a sad song?
It's usually a sad song will be into happy song or both or, you know, it's usually many
feelings at the same time.
When I'm writing, I'm usually carrying all of these feelings and I need to give myself
space to explore these different emotions in different languages or with different instruments
and sounds.
And of course, when I'm doing it, I'm just trying to be as present as I can and to really
just also find the joy and playfulness in it.
But of course, I wish that my role could be a little bit like the lamentator in the way
that I can help people process different emotions and to help them kind of not deny themselves
the safe space where all of these feelings can be felt at the same time.
So I really wish that I create a space where people can express themselves in different
ways and just to just feel all the emotions.
That is my wish.
But I do think that the way I can facilitate this is by just making sure that I'm being
the most honest version of myself as I can when I create the music.
And I don't think about the end results and how that can be, you know, met and with different,
you know, just positive or negative or whatever.
I just think about being as present as I can in that moment and giving myself that space.
And then I can invite other people in that safe space.
And yeah, I hope.
Yeah.
I haven't asked you yet, but have you ever tried psychedelics?
No, but my, I am intrigued by what would happen because when I talk about my experiences,
my one of my co-authors of the study and the specialist in psychedelics, he's like, but
sometimes you sound like you're already on psychedelics.
So I don't really know how you would react because I talk with trees and I'm the typical
tree hugging stereotype in that way.
But I'm a proud tree hugger.
I think it's a very, it's my innate need and I accept it.
Same.
I mean, I had a chat with Emma who's known as whispers red on, on YouTube.
She makes ASMR videos and she describes herself as a, as being hypersensitive and that sense
of being receptive to the world and to its sounds.
She reflected that.
You know, she talked about it.
She also talked about it in the conversation we had.
And I do think there is a link between being hypersensitive and being creative, but also
caring for animals and having this different relation with animals.
Yeah.
There might be something there.
And I think some studies that, or, you know, just, just argumentations that, you know,
why would you want to care about animals or be, you know, vegan or whatever, because it,
you know, it just makes you depressed and you feel bad.
I do think that it is hard to feel good when all the time and be shippy hip, like shippy
happy when you know that, but there is an ongoing industry that creates suffering.
I, I, I, I think that it is the same with, you know, terms such as echo or climate anxiety.
I do think that they are healthy responses to an unhealthy way of living life and, you
know, an unhealthy way of treating the planet.
And so I do think that some of, you know, the negative consequences of caring is healthy
responses to something that is sick.
So I, I think that sometimes maybe, I don't know, but maybe it can be, you know, you want
to show the positive things about being an animal rights activist or caring about different
causes, but, but it's also a struggle.
And we, we feel sad sometimes and overwhelmed and really powerless and, and just being against
these powerful, powerful industries and trying to do what we can.
It can be, it can be really hard.
And I just recently, I mean, I've experienced burnout and I do, and I, and I, and I think
that, you know, we always carry the feeling of that we have to do more and that what we
do is not enough, et cetera.
But it is really important to find the way, the best we can in an unsustainable world,
but to try to find sustainable ways in our activism and in our lives where we can still
care, but we take care of ourselves and not stigmatizing that we feel bad because it's,
I think it's, it's a very normal and healthy response to something.
I mean, just knowing what happens is, it's hard.
It, it, well, to, to be really plain, it sucks.
It sucks, but yeah, and it can be really hard.
So self-compassion is, it's also important.
Yeah.
Well, my message and the message of the podcast is that action is a way to overcome those
feelings to find strength in your situation.
Yep.
And because what you're describing is a sense of being overpowered.
Well, claim back your power, find the action you can do and go outside and do something
and connect with people and make a difference that will make you feel better.
So what is your message for the people who are dealing with that, with those emotions,
but who stay passive?
They're not prepared.
It depends.
I mean, I can understand that if you, if you feel like it's, it's, it's really hard to
do something because of the environment that you're in or whatever, that you might be in
a strong opposition or I think just finding ways of finding rooms where you can express
yourself maybe might be a start to find the rooms where you, where you can dive into more
topics or learn more or also I think that animal rights is not, it can be treated as
a, as a, as a marginalized, you know, like subtopic, but it's, it's really interlinked
with other forms of oppression.
And if, if it's, if it is hard where you're at to kind of do something for animal rights,
it's also important to just be an ally for other causes because they're interlinked.
So if you just do something to decrease the risk of dehumanization of any being, it is
really, I do think that it, it helps the world.
And I do also think that for us, there are active in the animal rights movement to also
be good allies to other movements because we, we do have the same movement.
We are part of the same social justice movement.
Animals are included in the social justice movement and we're kind of one movement against
again, the commodification and just the individualization of different bodies.
And maybe I think just for me, I think just being, I've come to learn with, with all the
years now that I've, that I've been advocating for animal rights.
When I've just been myself in different rooms, no matter if it's with relatives that were
like, Oh, this is such a trend.
I'm like, okay, like 15 years later.
No, but the thing that is a trend or whatever, just, just being who you are consistent and
being just standing up for what you believe in and what you buy or, or just asking a question
like, Oh, you think that animals are like that.
Why do you think that?
Because I know the studies have shown this, just being somebody in the room that asks
a question that might just a little bit combat the human exceptionalism in the room, maybe
can do, can, can start something.
And years later, a relative might come to you and say, do you know what?
I've just, I I'm only eating plant based now.
And that was the relative that were freely thought that you were going through a phase
and after a while saw, Oh, that is a way that you can live your life.
Okay.
I'm going to try.
And then the, you've made all of a sudden you've made the lifestyle that you've, you've
chosen more accessible to other people just by showing another person how to live that
life.
Other ways that you said, I think is really important.
I mean, just organizing with other people and finding your groups and maybe finding
the group locally.
I think locally is a really good way to start.
If everyone would organize themselves in local groups, you could do a lot of things.
Just just a personal example of deforestation and here in Sweden, I've, it's so easy to
just have anxiety over all the reports on planned clear cuts that are coming in.
And I just feel like, Oh my God, just an ongoing amputation just happening.
And the, the really tangible anxiety that I feel in those moments.
And when I try to avoid looking at them, that doesn't help because I still know that they're
happening.
So persistence is really can really be an act of hope, an act of a missioning in other
future and together that is really powerful.
So I've organized with other local people in my hometown, just writing emails, talking
to professional biologists and getting help on the way, finding allies.
That is, that is just like you say, that is really a strategy for not getting stuck in
that anxiety.
And of course, finding ways how to express yourself that works to help you become resilient
in a world that, that can really break you down because of the way it is.
So for me, it's music or sometimes it's dancing or whatever, just finding those expressions
that help you to also grieve.
It's really important, I think to grieve because it's so much loss.
It's so sad.
And when we give ourselves permission to grieve, we also help ourselves to feel that powerful
joy in experiencing life the way we do with interaction with animals or other humans that
have, that wants to do what we want to do with goals or to combat whatever issue.
So I do think, I agree with you, finding ways to organize yourself and, but also finding
ways to rest and express yourself individually and collectively in ways where you see that
there's a lot of emotions that come with transformation and struggle and trying to create something
resilient.
Who wins when we break down and we can't do anything?
So, status quo.
So it's important.
And I mean, I've myself experienced burnout, so I'm not an expert at all.
I don't live as I learn.
I haven't always, but that's also how I know that it's hard.
Yeah.
I never heard about grieving the loss of animals before.
And I truly admire that, that you went and taught about that because I definitely thought
that we should have something like a monument remembering all of these, all of those animals,
the billions of them.
And we can't even wrap our mind around that number.
And we should at least have some kind of monument to their memory.
But you might be on something here when you say, when you talk about grieving, because
maybe lots of vegans are not so much experiencing being powerless, but being in grief of all
of that loss that nobody sees.
So truly it's powerful stuff here.
Yeah.
I personally experienced grief.
I lost my dad a couple of years ago and just seeing how society, due to his illness and
his age and other isms that you could attach to him, how I felt that my grief wasn't as
acute or like, I really understood what I've learned throughout the years when it comes
to processes of dehumanization.
And I'm really grateful for that knowledge because it helped me to kind of be prepared
for those personal experiences of grief and experience that kind of grief with your family
member and then experiencing grief on a collective level.
And also grief of seeing how your natural surrounding, who was one of your safety nets
in keeping yourself sane during this period of time, was destroyed, really made me realize
the importance of what you're saying, that our grief is seen and how we are given the
space to grieve.
And in society, we might not be given that time to grieve or that space.
And depending on what we grieve or who we grieve, society might be more or less willing
to acknowledge that grief.
So it's very important to create communities and have people around you that identifies
and sees your grief and says, I understand that you are grieving.
And if you don't have that, well, at least to give yourself the permission to grieve
and finding ways how to connect with your grieving body through different ways of experiencing
yourself to dance or whatever has really helped me.
And I do think we talk too little.
I do think we need to have a conversation about grief when it comes to climate change,
for instance.
I do think that, I mean, I'm working on an instrumental album right now that is really
about that, that is about instrumental music, about grieving processes related to climate
change and just how are we supposed to deal with the transformation that we are facing,
that we're having to prepare ourselves for.
It can be also a positive transformation, just like when we talked about lamentation
and how we need to get help to process different emotions in transformation.
It doesn't matter if the transformation is a good one.
We will still probably need to grieve.
So for instance, if we transform our relationship with animals to a more positive one, we will
still have to grieve what we lost, all the relationships that we lost because we didn't
acknowledge the relationships that were relationships.
We just thought they were business trades or whatever.
We just thought they were objects.
So I do think that we need tools as communities, as societies, as individuals to kind of process
all these emotions.
And culture and music can be one tool, but also just creating cultures and politics that
acknowledge that when our surroundings change or when something happens in our lives, we
need to grieve and we need to have the contexts where we can process these emotions.
And if these are destroyed or disrespected in a way, of course that hurts us.
So I am so happy that you jumped on the grief train because that is a train that I've been
on for a lot of years now.
And I appreciate that you were the one bringing this up in a way because we went there.
Amazing.
And thank you for sharing your insights.
This discussion reminds me of a concept that I truly love.
It's about spirituality because that's the underlying theme of what we're talking about
here, spirituality.
And it says that spirituality doesn't have to be vertical about a pantheon of gods and
angels and stuff like that.
It can also be horizontal.
We can have a horizontal spirituality in the sense of building, again, connections and
relationships with our community, but also here with nature and animals.
And I truly love that reference image of horizontal versus vertical spirituality.
I want to ask, feel free to answer however you want, but do you find that there is any
vertical spirituality to our understanding of nature and our relationships with animals?
As I interpret your question, you can let me know if I didn't understand you correctly.
But in many ways, the way we look at animals is really based on power dynamics.
It really stems from the agricultural and domestication of the early agricultural revolution
when it comes to domestication of animals happened at the same time as the major religions
came in.
So from what I understand it.
So I do believe that religion was a way of rationalizing how to treat animals and how
to domesticate animals and how to create an animal industry.
And I do think that seeing humans as godlike can also be a way of encouraging human exceptionalism
in a way.
And I mean, I am, personally speaking, I've never, I'd heard to a certain religion brought
up in a household quite the contrary, where my mother has been studying theology.
It's called theologi in Swedish.
I don't know if it's the right word in English, but you know, the history of goddesses and
those kind of things.
And we have a famous poet in Finland called Eva Kilpi, who has written, she's 97 or something
now, I think.
And she wrote a whole book with the theme of nature and animals called Animalia.
And if I remember correctly, yeah.
And she wrote that if you look into an animal's eye, you will see God or the Almighty.
And that was very controversial for that time.
But I do agree with her in a way, even though I don't, you know, I talk with the God or
whatever.
I do think that the way I see it is that we live in a world where we're striving towards
monoculture, where everything is, you know, you see trees in line, it's a monoculture.
The way we've created our agricultural productions, the way we've done, the way we've created
our religions is now very monocultural.
And for me, I think a more variety or many gods or many practices will be quite nice.
I don't know, the horizontal view that you said, I like that because that reminded me
of the Eva Kilpi poem.
It reminded me that at least you can believe in God, but also be part of it somehow.
That's the connection thing again.
Do you feel connected to something and still separated from it?
What is that connection?
Instead of connection, I would like to say relationship, because that requires us to
place ourselves like in the room or in something that is an active ongoing thing where we have
to be, even if it's a negative relationship or positive, we place ourselves easier in
the room when we talk about the word relationship.
Relationship can be something that we kind of connect into server, logging out.
Our relationship requires something from us and can also give us something more.
So I like the term relationship and relations and how we can just experience life through
relationships and having role models or having an awe, an awe for something can be, doesn't
have to come with power and balances and things like that.
I like the horizontal view, but I'm biased because I'm brought up that way.
I do understand the role of religious communities and I'm absolutely not, again, I understand
I have pretty much the same sentiment for some kind of universe and interconnection
and interrelations.
I have that notion, but I mean, sure, we're talking about spirituality once again.
It's maybe the term is spirituality.
I like the way you put it more.
I think you should just erase my answer, just like your question asks also the answer.
Can we do that?
Your answer was great.
I don't know why you say that.
I should feel it was so poignant.
It was there.
But yeah, I agree.
I should have just said I agree.
No, it was good.
I truly like the thing you said about seeing God in the eyes of animals.
I think this will be shocking to hear for a listener who is not vegan and for whom animals
have no presence and absolutely no personhood.
But I think if you accept that animals are more than what we have been brought up to
believe they are, I think why not consider them and integrate them in our religious practices
and our spirituality?
Yeah.
And maybe just like making a full circle, maybe that is what we have done and humans have
done and all thinkers from thousands of years ago said that you could see the God in the
animal eyes.
But as a culture, we have just not highlighted those people because we know that there have
been acts of resistance towards the way animals are being treated throughout history.
And we talked about it before with the academia and why animals are not as highlighted or
a marginalized subject in different fields and etc.
It's where we place our focus and how we tell the story of humankind.
And it's good if we raise more positive examples of what it might mean to take the animal perspective
if you say like that.
And how many of us, how many have been before us and how we're part of something bigger.
We tend to also maybe do the human exceptionalism or the exceptionalism with ourselves.
Like I am the exception.
And in some way, sure, we are because we are marginalized in the way that we see and want
to treat animals.
But in other way, we're not exceptional.
We're just part of a bigger movement, a resistance movement, also a larger social justice movement
with other related issues.
So I think that that can be empowering as well to remember that throughout history,
there have been voices that have said things that were talked about things that maybe you
and I are talking about right now and that we should highlight them because we humans
are continuously writing our own history and who gets to write that history.
And that is also like an act of resistance and trying to combat the way that that is
being written, it's being written humans as superior and whatever.
So I think that that can also be a fun conversation to find the role models of today and yesterday
and thousand years before that.
And yeah, at the beginning of the conversation, you talked about how this was liberating for
you to discover the animal rights fight.
And this is what psychedelics are about, liberating your mind.
And I think it could be the theme of our conversation, liberating ourselves from all of those dogmas,
cultural beliefs and things that are just burdening us and working to harm us.
So Ellen, I have been talking with you for about two hours now.
I think it's the longest podcast episode I ever recorded.
Have a fun time in the post-production.
Well, I think most of it was incredible.
I don't think that I will have to edit lots of things in what was said.
I hope listeners think the same way.
I feel like, oh my God, why is it stopping?
No, but thank you.
It was a really interesting discussion.
Can I just ask you something before we go?
And here is half an hour more.
No, I'm kidding.
No, but you said something about how you've experienced that some terms are being used
within the movement or when it comes to speciesism and those kind of things.
And to be fair, I have not been, because I've moved a bit away from research and human animal
studies towards more culture and the music now and focusing on the forest issue here
in Sweden.
So I feel a bit unpolished on that area now.
So could you kind of develop a bit more what you meant with those kind of terms that you
have experienced and those kind of things?
Because that stuck with me.
What terms?
I'm not remembering.
We're talking about how speciesism is used and how it's kind of a shallow way of seeing
things.
Or you were talking about kind of going deeper into certain things and kind of nuancing in
different terms.
Yes, I think we had that conversation before I started recording.
I'll develop that now because I do want to know.
Well I was thinking about how we often in the public discourse around veganism, we tend
to take a kind of a more superficial way, but more simplistic way.
I think that this vegan movement and the ideas we're putting forth are radical in many ways,
going against centuries of traditions.
But we are not maybe fully conscious of the implications of this philosophy.
Or maybe we simplify veganism because we are on this activism mode all of the time, always
speaking to non-vegans instead of speaking to vegans.
So maybe less conversations between ourselves and more conversations directed to non-vegans.
And if I had to give maybe concrete examples of that, I would say we use veganism and we
often mean plant-based diet.
So we reduce sometimes veganism to a diet and we concentrate on the health and lifestyle
aspect.
So yeah, I'm a bit vague right now.
I don't know if I'm clear.
Yeah.
No, but I see what you mean.
And of course there's a value in simplifying depending on the kind of target group or messaging
and trying to make it simple for people to understand or what can I do to do this or
for this result and blah, blah.
But as you say, as we talked about before with kind of like internal or external solutions
to problems when it comes to like climate change or whatever, that a lot of these things
happen inside of us, these processes, and we manifest them in our lives.
But we're not born with them.
They come from somewhere.
We are being fed by these kind of social cultural ideas of, for instance, human-animal relations
and how they should look like.
And the foundation of that is really questions like who has worth, why, who is part of nature,
who's part of culture, who is a body, who's a mind, who is worth, those kind of questions.
And that is why I liked research in the first place because I can just ask a lot of questions.
But that is also why I like just being, having conversations because you, usually the questions,
I think now is the time for questions.
How can we create, how can we create interventions that help us transform the way we treat animals
and like our surroundings in a positive way?
How can we connect these oppressive mechanisms in, through words, for example, like dehumanization
and how can we see our blind spots?
I think just by asking ourselves questions, we have done something.
We have, and that's why research love questions because we have realized that we might not
know everything, but we can just move on from there and try to gather as much information
as possible and most importantly, embody what that means to ask these questions and embody
the answers that we find.
I completely agree.
I think we have realized so much, but we're still reacting to those realizations, not
having fully appreciated the depth of those realizations and what they mean for our cultures
and for ourselves.
Yeah.
And we have all of these technical means to kind of quickly answer like some questions
that are more external, fix this and fix that and how can we do this?
But we've seen, as we've talked about, we've seen the consequences of technology in its
worst light.
I mean, one solution to decreasing the risk of pandemics is to just keep animals more
compact in a really closed space.
But is that a solution that we want?
Is that something that we would face and say, oh, sounds appropriate?
Or would our cognitive dissonance be like ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding, ding?
We need to say that they're harvested and it's a nice environment with a big TV where
they can see other animals.
I don't know how we would rationalize that, but you know what I mean.
And these other questions that have to do with who we are I think are the most important
now in moving forward.
And again, as you said, it's also a part of spirituality.
Who am I?
What do I find important?
How can I support other people?
What can I do to create the world that I envision and create the spaces that we need to dare
ourselves to envision that another world is possible?
It's very important to not restrict ourselves and our potential.
And I want to give an example that is close to my heart of one of those questions that
you're referring to.
The very first episode of this podcast was a conversation with Dr. Jens Vult, who is
a primate communication expert.
And the very first question I asked her was, do chimpanzees truly understand human language
when they communicate with sign language?
We have seen those famous videos of chimpanzees using sign language.
Or is it just like a conditioning trick, like a parrot repeating phrases and words?
And she said, no, we know that they understand the sense, the meaning of the word, and that
they're truly using human language.
And then she said, it's interesting.
It remains so controversial because it rattles the foundation of who we are as a species.
Yeah.
I mean, we have the information, but we don't know what to do with it.
Exactly.
We don't want to embody it.
Yes.
Chimpanzees can use human language.
Now what?
That's why I love the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy and just also using humor to help
us humans see ourselves from the outside and see the pride that we might have the way we
see ourselves.
Because it really helps.
I mean, just taking that example, for instance, as aliens coming and just looking at us and
how we are doing things and just they're super smart or AI, whatever the beings might be,
and just seeing ourselves from the outside, just like in the Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy where the animals are like, no, we knew what was going on.
I love that so much.
I think it does something with us.
I think that's why I do think that culture has a huge role to play in this because it
helps us in our imagination to also envision another world, a world that is very much here
already because we live in an interconnected world.
But our role might be different in this new envisioned world or our feelings or our mindsets.
But just helping us envision these worlds and help us envision, it's just like how
humans might be perceived by other animals.
Or to quote Franz de Waal, are we smart enough to know how smart animals are?
Are we?
Or maybe we are smart enough, but maybe we just don't, as you say, we're not ready.
Because it would just, again, then our human exceptionalistic argumentations would not
work anymore.
And wouldn't that be a bliss?
I look forward to the day.
Well, I think it's a great way to end the conversation.
Ellen, thank you so much for having accepted my invitation and for having answered my question.
What an interesting and fascinating and inspiring conversation we had.
I will certainly be thinking about it in the coming days.
So Ellen, thank you again.
Thank you so much.
It was great.
Thank you everyone for listening.
I kindly invite you to share this podcast with the vegans you know.
Let's encourage more people to take action.
Again, thank you so much for caring, and I will see you next Tuesday for a new episode.