Meet Daniel

“Cultivating Interests is my project of authenticity…”

Background

Daniel Covington is a husband, father, and an ecologist at-heart. For the past 25 years, Daniel has been a wetland scientist, botanist, and stream restoration ecologist in the Pacific Northwest, and he’s had a long-standing relationship with plant medicine and plant technology. Since 2019, Daniel volunteered for the Measure 109 campaign in Oregon, co-launched a similar ballot measure in Washington, and has made an ever-growing project of developing a common language around psychedelics. His passion for cultivation, advocacy, deeper understanding of self, and the art of communication spawned the Cultivating Interests platform, and he is thrilled to bring it to you. “Cultivating Interests is my project of authenticity,”

So, why trust your psychedelic curiosities to an ecologist? Well, one of the best definitions of “psychedelic” is “a reduction or elimination of anxiety because you’ve seen the bigger picture”. A hallmark of the psychedelic experience is the expansion of “consciousness”, which can be thought of as “an appropriate understanding of the relationship between cause and effect”. “Ecology” is the study of cause and effect in the natural world (and the webs of relationships therein). So, ecology can be thought of as the real-world application of the psychedelic enterprise - they both yield a broader scope of understanding and the “bigger picture”. Daniel views the psychedelic experience through this ecological lens, yielding an interesting and effective way to understand psychedelics.

Motivations

The motivations are many. Three of the main motivators are as follows:

We need to reduce our anxiety and increase altruism. We have many sources of anxiety, and anxiety adversely affects our lives. Psychedelics hold the potential to reduce anxiety, thereby improving our well being. Also, psychedelics can foster altruism and empathy (openness towards others and a greater willingness to help others). So, psychedelics may hold the potential to reconnect us and make us think before we act.
Our environment. Psychedelics improve nature-relatedness, or one’s awareness of the environment and our appropriate place in it. Gus Speth, and environmental lawyer and advocate said “……the top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy… and to deal with those we need spiritual and cultural transformation.” Collectively, we need to undergo a major shift, and a society that embraces the responsible use of psychedelics could initiate that shift.
Our communication is lacking. We just don’t communicate well with each other. The top reason for relationship failure (marriages, business relationships, and friendships) is poor communication or an absence of communication. At its heart, the psychedelic enterprise is a revisioning of how we communicate with ourselves and each other. Coupled with the quality of “openness” towards others, psychedelics hold the potential to improve both the clarity and honesty of our communication.