Name: Learning from the Living World with Kathleen Harrison, Meghan Walla-Murphy, and Erik Davis
Start: 2026-02-25T18:00:00-08:00
Location: The Alembic

Learning from the Living World with Kathleen Harrison, Meghan Walla-Murphy, and Erik Davis

Join Kat Harrison, ethno-botanist and co-founder of Botanical Dimensions, and Meghan Walla-Murphy, animal tracker and ecological writer, for a lively discussion about how we can tune into the deep learning available from our spirited world. Whether in the form of animals, or plants, or ancestors, beings from outside the disenchanted world of modernity lean in with tales to tell, challenges to mount, and wisdom to learn. What does it mean to be animist today? Moderated by fellow traveler Erik Davis.
Kathleen Harrison, MA, is an independent scholar and teacher of ethnobotany. Her work explores the relationship between plants, mushrooms and human beings—particularly in the realms that are often hidden: cultural beliefs, personification of species, rituals of healing and initiation, vision-seeking modalities, and artistic creations that illustrate the plant-human relationship. Since the 1970s, Kathleen has done recurrent fieldwork in Mesoamerica, the Amazon Basin, the West Coast subcultures, and the Pacific islands, and is a published author and photographer. She also studies and teaches the deep history of humans in nature, encompassing the eras both before and since the advent of agriculture. Kat continues to teach classes on psychedelic perspectives and various branches of ethnobotany.
For nearly three decades Meghan Walla-Murphy has dedicated her life to wildlife tracking. Though a seemingly esoteric vocation given the technological age we live in, this ancient art of tracking has given Meghan the skills to read landscapes, better understand ecology, and understand social dynamics, which enables her to also work on a variety of social, conservation, and pedagogical challenges in her community. Tracking has also lead Meghan into a deep dive with Traditional Ecological Knowledge, which serves as a bridge between mainstream environmentalism and the rich diverse world of animism.