Works by
J. P. Harpignies
(Editor, Writer)

Books

• Visionary Plant Consciousness: The Shamanic Teachings of the Plant World (2007), J. P. Harpignies, ed.
  23 leading experts reveal the ways that psychoactive plants allow nature’s “voice” to speak to humans and what this communication means for our future
   

  • Presents the specific “human-plant interconnection” revealed by visionary plants

  • Explores the relevance of plant-induced visions and shamanic teachings to humanity’s environmental crisis

  • With contributions from Alex Grey, Andrew Weil, Charles S. Grob, Dale Pendell, Dennis McKenna, Edison Saraiva, M.D., Ethan Nadelmann, Ph.D., Florencio Siquera de Caralho, Francis Huxley, Jeffrey Bronfman, Jeremy Narby, John Mohawk, Kat Harrison, Katsi Cook, Luis Eduardo Luna, Ph.D., Marcellus Bear Heart Williams, Michael Pollan, Michael Stewartt, Paul Stamets, Terence McKenna, Wade Davis, and others

  Visionary plants have long served indigenous peoples and their shamans as enhancers of perception, thinking, and healing. These plants can also be important guides to the reality of the natural world and how we can live harmoniously in it.
  
  In Visionary Plant Consciousness, editor J. P. Harpignies has gathered presentations from the Bioneers annual conference of environmental and social visionaries that explore how plant consciousness affects the human condition. Twenty-three leading ethnobotanists, anthropologists, medical researchers, and cultural and religious figures present their understandings of the nature of psychoactive plants and their significant connection to humans. What they reveal is that these plants may help us access the profound intelligence in nature--the “mind of nature”--that we must learn to understand in order to survive our ecologically destructive way of life.

• Ecological Medicine: Healing the Earth, Healing Ourselves (2004), Kenny Ausubel, ed. with J. P. Harpignies
  Drawn largely from luminous presentations given at the annual Bioneers Conference, this pathfinding book--the first in a new Bioneers Series published by Sierra Club Books--focuses on pragmatic solutions emerging at the fertile edges between the overlapping worlds of environmental restoration and holistic healing. In this kaleidoscopic collection, many of the world's leading health visionaries show us how human health is inescapably dependent on the health of our environment.
  
  The rich array of voices in this book reflects the collective intelligence of the emerging movement known as Ecological Medicine. Its advocates look to the strategic public health measures that first do no harm to the environment and, in turn, successfully improve human health. They call for prevention and precaution as the first line of action. They seek to heal the tragic split that conventional medicine made from nature and to conjure nature's own mysterious capacity for self-repair. They celebrate the virtues of ancient natural-medicine practices but also embrace an integrative medicine that uses the best of all approaches to healing--with special emphasis on the centrality of the human spirit in the healing process. Their inspiring work, described so compellingly in this book, is of critical relevance to everyone concerned about health and the environment.

• Nature's Operating Instructions: The True Biotechnologies (2004), Kenny Ausubel, ed. with J. P. Harpignies
  "Biotechnology" as generally understood is a misnomer, having less to do with biology than with generating profits from genetic manipulation. The corporatizing of genetic science is just the latest risky manifestation of a dysfunctional industrial paradigm based on consuming natural capital and producing toxic waste--an economic model totally at odds with the evolutionary intelligence of living systems.
  
  But there is another way. The "true biotechnologies," described in this second volume in the Bioneers series, are working strategies grounded in the innate complexity, relatedness, and sustainability of natural ecosystems. The contributors to this volume are visionary leaders in fields such as biomimicry (mimicking nature in order to restore nature and serve human ends harmlessly), "living machines" that break down toxics biologically, natural design for industrial processes and buildings, and the restoration of natural capital. Their guiding principles include diversity, kinship, symbiosis, reciprocity, and community. These brilliant innovators illuminate a future environment of hope by "wedding human ingenuity with the wisdom of the wild," as contributor John Todd puts it.
  
  Human beings are a keystone species with an essential role to play in the ecological well-being of our world; we are only just learning how to go about it. Sector by sector--from energy and agriculture to transportation, industrial production, and land management--the true biotechnologies described here show how nature has already orchestrated a symphony of intelligent design that we can emulate and adapt, to the benefit of humanity and all life on Earth.

• Political Ecosystems: Modernity, Complexity, Fluidity and the Eco-Left (2004)
  Political Ecosystems is an unusual and highly original appeal to left-progressives and environmentalists and those sympathetic to those movements. It urges them to engage in more thorough self-examination, to assess more realistically their strengths, weaknesses and blind spots, and to learn to look at the darkened American political panorama through a variety of far more sophisticated lenses, and with a broader, longer, more nuanced view of history, culture and social change. A modest yet deeply informed account of the current state of eco and social justice activism and its adherents, Harpignies invites us to engage in a rigorous, but entertaining, and ideally rejuvenating, set of ideological calisthenics.

• Double Helix Hubris: Against Designer Genes (1997)