Consciousness & Plants: Consciousness Studies with Dr. Laura Pustarfi

What do plants have to do with consciousness? Human beings perceive plants and trees utilizing our own sensory experience. Certain plants, such as those considered psychedelic or entheogenic, can alter human consciousness. Scientists and scholars in the humanities have debated whether plants themselves can be considered intelligent, sentient, cognitive, or even conscious. Spanning from plant souls to plant signalling and behaviour, this presentation and discussion seeks to bring the “vegetal turn,” a move toward recognizing plants as intelligent agents with their own lives, to conversations regarding consciousness.

Laura Pustarfi, Ph.D., is adjunct faculty in Philosophy and Religion and Director of the Psychedelic-Assisted Therapies and Research Certificate Program at California Institute of Integral Studies (CIIS) in San Franscisco, California. Her scholarly interests include plant studies, integral ecology, psychedelic philosophy, and environmental humanities, especially environmental philosophy, eco-phenomenology, and religion and ecology. She is currently working on a volume co-edited with Dr. David Macauley, The Wisdom of Trees: Thinking Through Arboreality, forthcoming in 2025 from SUNY Press. Laura has presented at the several conferences on both plant studies and psychedelic-assisted therapy nationally and internationally.

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