The Climate of Consciousness

Harvard Divinity School

This conversation was part of the fall 2021 series "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now." The featured speaker was writer Michael Pollan. Michael Pollan has been educating us with illuminating prose on “the botany of desire” for a very long time. He discusses his latest book "This Is Your Mind On Plants" and his landmark bestseller "How To Change Your Mind: What the New Science of Psychedelics Teaches Us About Consciousness, Dying, Addiction, Depression, and Transcendence." Pollan’s call for change, restoration, and resiliency may be the very thing we need to bolster our consciousness in the midst of climate collapse. Respondent: Charles Stang, director of the Center for the Study of World Religions About this event series: "Weather Reports: The Climate of Now" is a ten-week series of online conversations with poets, writers, public servants, theologians, biologists, scholars, and activists who are engaged in the spiritual reckoning and awakening surrounding climate collapse, sacred land protection, and planetary health. Environmentalist, author, and HDS Writer-in-Residence Terry Tempest Williams will lead conversations concerning our response to climate chaos: How might we recast this a time of meaning rather than despair? How do arts and activism combine to let us see possibility instead of pessimism? Where do we find the strength to fully face all that is breaking our hearts?