What’s the Real Cost of Flying for Psychedelic Healing?

Everyone wants psychedelic healing, and people are willing to go far for it — quite literally. If a retreat they want to partake in or a community they trust and want to journey with is located on the other side of the planet, then so be it. Distance becomes part of the process, even if it means burning a little jet fuel to get there. Some good is simply worth the bad, right?

The plant medicine community appears to be deeply concerned about our Earth. In psychedelic circles, many even see these plants and compounds as tools to change our ways and inspire deep shifts towards ecological awareness. Yet, the spirit of environmentalism rarely seems to translate into our very own choices. The attempt to seek psychedelic healing, for most people, justifies flying across countries — even continents — often multiple times a year. Meanwhile, the climate catastrophe is in full swing. 

So why is no one talking about this?

Aviation might be a relatively small contributor to total greenhouse gas emissions, but its extremely high emissions-intensity, a measure of how “carbon-heavy” something is for each unit of activity (such as each kilometre or mile traveled), completely dwarfs the impact of almost all other measures one might take as an individual to attempt a sustainable life. Demand for flights is growing rapidly, and this demand is heavily skewed toward the planet's few richest. Much of the psychedelic community, at least in the West, falls into that group and so belongs to the most frequent flyers. Maybe this is because the true environmental impact of flying is still poorly understood. 

A single return flight from New York to Lima, Peru, for example, emits more than 2 tons of CO2 eq. per passenger — and there are usually between 200 and 250 passengers on a commercial flight of that route at a time. If you don't speak "earth system modeling," that is a lot. The carbon emissions exceed an Earthling´s entire annual "carbon budget" — and it’s burned in just a couple of hours. A carbon budget, simply put, is the amount of greenhouse gases that each person is "allowed" to add to the atmosphere for millennia if we want to keep climate change within "only" catastrophic levels of 1.5 degrees temperature rise by 2100.

It sounds complicated, but the idea is actually straightforward: Every bit of greenhouse gas added to the atmosphere warms the planet a little more. Scientists know how much the Earth has already heated, they know the temperature limit we ought to stay under, and they know how much carbon is already in the air. The gap between those numbers is our remaining global “carbon budget,” which is the amount we can still emit before we cross into irreversible trouble. It is a physical reality, and humanity is part of it even if people prefer not to acknowledge it. When the remaining carbon budget is divided among everyone on the planet, each person gets roughly 1.5 tons of CO₂eq. per year, and that number is shrinking fast. A single flight that lasts only a few hours can use it up entirely. We live at a critical moment in history where each gram might make the difference on whether we breach irreversible tipping points. It may sound abstract, but those grams of emissions and those degrees of warming, they translate directly into lives lost. And no one wants that. 

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The vast majority of people who fly for psychedelic journeys do so out of the very best intentions. They want to heal. Themselves and —  more often than not — heal the world, too. No one wants to accelerate the destruction of the very forest and its communities that supported them during their last visit to the jungle. There is a reason psychedelic offerings are booming, and it is that the world is in dire need of change. There is a glow in the eyes of my friends and colleagues when they tell me about their upcoming mushroom retreat in Costa Rica or their yearly Ayahuasca ceremony in Peru. They have found community and a sense of hope in those places, in a way that seemingly wasn't available in their own homes, and I am happy for them. Flying back and forth around the world for a transformation so deep feels like no obstacle at all. And I understand that. How could anyone measure the value of a renewed heart in tons of carbon? How could we ever attach a carbon footprint to healing?

There are people whose lives have been saved by a psychedelic journey in the jungle, quite literally. I am sure they'd make that trip again, and I don't blame them. In the Western world, a culture of disconnection and materialism has robbed many people of any deeper sense of meaning to life, and the only remedy we have been offered at home, often by design, is more consumption. In our unrecognized loneliness, many people learn to reach for more, always for themselves. When that no longer works, as it eventually does, doctors offer pills for the body and “disorder” diagnoses for the mind. In other places far from home, psychedelic experiences can offer different answers.

They have begun to restore community, meaning, and joy to people’s lives, and that kind of renewal is something the world, including the environment, urgently needs. Given psychedelic prohibition and lack of local access, long-distance travel often feels unavoidable. Someone may worry about the impact of their flights, yet still find that psychedelic healing is not available to them in any legal or safe form where they live. This is the reality for most people. In most cases, people are left with choosing between a severe clinical diagnosis and a difficult path through the medical system, or steep prices for luxury retreats. Accessibility is a real issue, especially when the goal is an experience that feels safe, legal, and supportive. In the words of Ram Dass, "It is difficult in a paranoid society to find a non-paranoid setting." I'm sure most people would prefer not to fly at all if they had another option.

So with aviation accounting for a mere 2.5% of global emissions, it becomes all too easy to push down our bad conscience with a little bit of well-practiced avoidance, and justify a flight by focusing on how meaningful the journey feels. I have done this many times. Even if everyone stopped flying tomorrow, the world would still face a difficult future. It was tempting to think I should go after whatever small happiness I could find while I still had the chance.

But responsibility doesn't work that way. While our individual actions alone won't save us, the truth is that waiting for “systemic” actions from above won't either. It makes a difference what we make ourselves complicit with, and the vision of happiness and healing we put into the world truly matters, even if it cannot be measured. Every little action we take sends ripples outward, far beyond what we can easily grasp. This is where psychedelics can offer profound insight.

They enable us not only to believe in but to feel our place in the vast web of existence. The insight comes as a kind of paradox: we see how small we are, how little the universe depends on us, and how we are no longer at the center of everything. That realization is what frees us to act with real integrity. When we understand that every event follows from what came before it, and that every choice creates its own momentum, we can let go of the exhausting urge to control the world.  In a wonderful irony, this surrender empowers us to focus our energy on the only way we can make a difference: by taking ownership of our immediate choices. The psychedelic experience can imprint on our minds that in a system as wickedly stuck as ours, the best place to ignite change is always right where we are. Rather than waiting for something big to happen and save us, we can see that “something big” is the sum of incremental human actions.

Sadly, I believe that many of us have fallen prey to a cultural understanding of "healing" that is ultimately limited. It is the very mindset of grasping for more that is the cause of our pain. "I need this" is often what my friends tell me, before they set off again to the other side of the world. But something in me wonders: if they don't find it in themselves, will they find it anywhere? Is the message really received if they need to keep going? It will be crucial to listen to Indigenous perspectives of those sharing medicine; those whose communities are often those most affected by the onset of climate collapse, yet might have come to depend on people flying in economically. My sense is, though, that economics won’t dictate my ethics, and that various wisdom traditions agree: it is by loosening our hold on specific experiences, specific places, and specific outcomes that we become free. And it is by stepping out of the sole center of the universe that we become whole. We must break the cultural myth that healing is an individual job. It is a relational one. What will heal us, as cheesy as it might sound, is love, and real love is selfless. It wants nothing in return. The moment we let go of a desire for a greater good is when we are truly on our path to healing.

This isn’t about shifting blame from corporations to individuals, and it isn’t an attempt to flight-shame. It is about making informed and aware choices, and embodying the change we want to see. Ultimately, if we step back, it's not to save a ton of CO₂ here and there. We do so to align our actions with our values. Psychedelic insight shows us that this does not have to feel like a righteous moral sacrifice. Choosing the greater good ultimately supports our own well-being. Sometimes, coming to this understanding does require a psychedelic trip abroad. That trip may prompt us to start engaging in our community after, or to change our careers. We can’t track the net effect of all our actions, and perfection is impossible. Only we ourselves can truly know what’s right or wrong. But eventually, true healing must become selfless; otherwise, it will become a loop of self-fulfillment and self-actualization that never resolves. If we truly want to heal, in the psychedelic spirit of an open mind, we need to be ready to face the impacts of our actions with courage and be honest with ourselves about where we stand on this journey from self to other.

The love, courage, and commitment that we bring back from our psychedelic journeys afar are immeasurable. But let's put them into practice. If we hop on a plane for a psychedelic adventure abroad, we have two resources that are hard to come by for most people in this world: money and time. This gives us power and opportunity. Maybe the most healing action we could take is to try to identify what is so sorely lacking in our own homes. Let’s make an effort to create that community that is missing. Let’s support the many ongoing efforts to decriminalize or legalize access to psychedelics in more places and make flying unnecessary in the future. Let’s protect and rewild our local nature, and find our mind-opening experience that way. Maybe it doesn't need to be the jungle. Maybe we don't need to have it all. To me, the opening of the heart that has come from stepping back from my desires in order to protect what I love has brought me infinitely more freedom than any psychedelic retreat ever could.  

Real healing is holistic; it includes healing our wider system just as much as it includes our individual pain. It also includes the recognition that, whether we like it or not, we are part of that system. The ecological revolution we need to unfold in order to save ourselves and the home we love is gaining momentum, thanks to the daily choices of countless individuals. It is a time of great turning in the cultural tides. The greatest potential the psychedelic movement holds is to become a meaningful part of that.

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