• kristina [she/her]@hexbear.net
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      11 months ago

      i actually looked into this and there is a way to harvest peyote sustainably (cutting precisely above the root and leaving some green with a clean and sanitized knife each time) but white techbro psychonauts are fucking idiots and just start whacking at it with a machete haphazardly, there are a lot of researchers that have them in a greenhouse but the key issue is root rot and too much watering, the greenhouse also has to get very hot so setting up a microclimate just for the cacti is expensive (re: capitalists prefer the cheap method of going out and ripping everything out of the ground for free)

      imo i dont think there is anything wrong with doing peyote or magic mushrooms or whatever, especially when it serves a medical purpose (like ptsd research), but you should be growing it sustainably so that the people that have rituals about going out in the wild and getting them and maintaining them arent screwed over (which afaik is the main complaint from indigenous groups). the plus side to growing at home is that you are helping preserve biodiversity, esp if you partake in guerilla planting of excess seeds. guerilla planting is the mvp and you ostensibly need to grow it at home to do that.

      i guerilla plant all sorts of endangered species in microclimates where they will outcompete invasive ones, its a very important thing to do and getting the seeds isnt actually that hard. whats hard is conservation societies dont have a complex understanding of local microclimates like a local does. ive been able to successfully purge non native grasses from huge swathes of local meadows over the past 10 years. when you do that it leads to a flourishing of native plants and wildlife, the grasses really are a keystone species that bring all the native stuff back in so many areas.