The man who popularised psychedelics returns with a book on consciousness

Michael Pollan recounts a startling moment at a plant behaviour conference in Vancouver when cell biologist František Baluška told him, “Yes, they should feel pain.” The exchange, which Pollan describes as disturbing, set the tone for his new book, A World Appears, and the knotty moral questions it raises: if plants might feel, where does that leave ethical consumption?

A World Appears marries Pollan’s long interest in plants with the inner life he explored in How to Change Your Mind. A psilocybin trip in his garden convinced him, briefly and vividly, of the sentience of the flowering plants around him and prompted a wider investigation into consciousness.

Pollan, once an executive editor of Harper’s Magazine, has spent his career turning complex topics—gardens, food systems, psychedelics—into readable narratives. He frames consciousness under four headings: sentience, feeling, thought and self.

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