In 2015, Thorstein Grunwald began a mythic undertaking. He sought extreme states of consciousness for the purpose of making scientific discoveries about the earth's carbon cycle that would allow for interventions in runaway climate change. Science already had a very long legacy of progress through the spontaneous visionary experiences of its practitioners, but Grunwald was one of the first people with any real success in deliberately, systematically seeking such visions. A decade after he began this work, Grunwald began to collaborate with the World Tree Center for Evolutionary Politics and Global Survival. As World Tree enters its 100th year of existence, we reflect on the few years of friendship and collaboration we shared with him before he was killed in combat in the 2030s. In the process, we examine how the reassertion of the centrality of the observer in science was essential to the politics of ecological survival that emerged to reshape the world in that decade.
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