A defining scholarly publication on the past and current state of research with psychedelic plant substances for medicine, therapeutics, and spiritual uses.Certain plants have long been known to contain healing properties and used to treat everything from depression and addiction, to aiding in on one’s own spiritual well-being for hundreds of years. Can Western medicine find new cures for human ailments by tapping into indigenous plant wisdom? And why the particular interest in the...

Why do a garden if you can put the green organism to work for you in your body? This is one of the mind-bending questions Lynn Margulis, one of the greatest scientists, fertile cross-disciplinary scientific thinkers and educators of our epoch, asks. She, ethnobotanist Wade Davis, and mycologist Paul Stamets weave tales of amazing plant intelligence like the Hat Thrower Mushroom and animals that eat light.