During the rest of their 15 minute chat, the tree clued Bill in to the profound fact that all life on earth—plant, animal, and human—was intimately connected. "It was as if someone was inside my head judging my feelings, my thoughts, and my emotions," Bill said. "It was also a two-way street, though: I could feel how old he was—he's obviously been through a lot with the way the earth is and how the town I live in was built up around him."

After taking LSD, Bill stood in his kitchen in Merseyside, England, staring at a large tree. When the tree started to speak to him, Bill only found it strange that the tree didn't formally introduce itself, he told VICE in 2017.

Anyone who has tripped—especially outdoors—knows that psychedelics, like LSD, mushrooms, DMT, or mescaline, can provoke sensations of awe and wonder at the natural world. This has been replicated in more formal settings too—in January 2018, scientists from Imperial College London found that psilocybin, the active ingredient in magic mushrooms, led to a significant increase in feelings of connection to nature after just one dose. Seven to 12 months later, that increase persisted.

“Before I enjoyed nature, now I feel part of it. Before I was looking at it as a thing, like TV or a painting…” one person in the study said. “[But now I see] there’s no separation or distinction, you are it.”

Psychedelics have been shown to help with addiction, anxiety, and depression. But outside the scope of mental illness, researchers are also asking how they can change personality traits and beliefs. An increase in nature-relatedness has been shown to be a unique predictor of happiness. But it is also associated with the planet’s well-being: There's a demonstrated link between having a relationship to nature and pro-environmental behavior.

A psychedelically-imposed connection with nature could do more than make for a Alice-in-Wonderland-esque story later. In the face of an impending climate crisis, there's a need to know why some people are motivated to act environmentally and others not.

The United Nations recently said that there are only 11 years left to prevent "irreversible damage" from a warming Earth. And yet a Pew Research survey from 2017 found that while three-quarters of Americans were concerned about personally helping the environment, only one in five actually make an effort in their daily lives. Meanwhile, the 100 companies responsible for 71 percent of global emissions take no decisive action to curb their impact, nor do governments hold them accountable.

In the face of an impending climate crisis, there's a need to know why some people are motivated to act environmentally and others not.

Researchers find that bombarding people with facts about climate isn't the best tactic. Dissecting the psychedelic experience could help policy makers, scientists, and journalists attempt to recreate the core feeling of relatedness that the drugs bring about: the sense that nature is a part of us, our bodies, our lives, and that we are a part of it. Capturing that might lead people to act to protect the planet, since the planet is an extension of themselves.

Ecologist Aldo Leopold wrote back in 1949, that “we abuse land because we regard it as a commodity belonging to us. When we see land as a community to which we belong, we may begin to use it with love and respect.” Since then, many other ecologists and social psychologists have proposed that a disconnection from nature is partly to blame for our inertia in responding to the climate crisis.