Sacred Plant Biocultural Recovery Initiative launched to safeguard endangered sacred and ceremonial plants for religious freedom

Sacred Plant Biocultural Recovery Initiative launched to safeguard endangered sacred and ceremonial plants used by Indigenous cultures and multiple spiritual traditions. The initiative frames threats from warfare, climate change, and overharvesting as challenges to religious freedom, and calls for “ceremonial activism” and technical support to restore plants in their original biocultural landscapes and return them to rightful caretakers. Planned work includes ecological restoration to protect habitats, seeding and transplanting spiritually significant species, and youth training to maintain community stewardship. It also addresses that some threatened sacred plants include a subset of psychedelic plants used in ceremonial healing, emphasizing that solutions must preserve plant-community relationships, not rely only on new regulations or gene banking.