A Field in England (2013), a British folk horror film, is analyzed for its portrayal of a psychedelic mushroom trip as a tool for ecological awareness. The film builds expectation of a transformative, ego-death experience but ultimately withholds any structural change in violence, control, or mastery over nature. This pessimistic view is reinforced by monochromatic aesthetics, a circular narrative, and landscape construction. The film exposes the fragility of the cultural fantasy of a 'fungal fix' for ecological responsibility.
This essay examines the writings and trip reports of key figures from the first psychedelic revolution—Ken Kesey, Timothy Leary, and Jane Dunlap (Adelle Davis)—through an eco-critical lens. It questions whether psychedelic experiences genuinely foster a love of nature and ecological consciousness, a concept termed psychedelic biophilia. The analysis includes an incident from the 2011 film The Magic Trip, based on 1964 footage by the Merry Pranksters. The essay argues that the relationship between early psychedelic advocates and nature has been neglected, despite the countercultural ethos that influenced the Earth Movement.
Contemporary American poet Dana Ward's work generates ecological thinking through an 'infinity lyric' mode shaped by psychedelic aesthetics, drifting attention, and shifting scales of perception. Close reading of Ward's two collections, alongside poststructuralist and new materialist theory, reveals an active reorganization of everyday experience that forges a psychedelic ecosophy linking mind, society, and environment through lyrical voice and movement. Ward's aesthetic of lysergic excess offers an ethical practice grounded not in transcendence but in immanent, relational forms of being. Infinity lyric models participatory, heterogeneous, and open-ended ways of attending to the world's material agencies.