The evening is themed Bridges to Ancestral Wisdom: Listening to Nature’s teachers - Coca, Ayahuasca, Huachuma and the preservation of Amazonian ethnobotany. Central to the event will be McKenna’s work in the preservation of South American botanical wisdom, particularly through initiatives like the Biognosis Initiative, which seeks to safeguard over 150,000 specimens in an Amazonian herbarium in Iquitos, Peru. This conservation effort is urgent: out of an estimated 85,000 plant species in the Amazon, only a fraction have been taxonomically verified, leaving vast ethnomedicinal potential hidden within the rain forest. Without targeted conservation, the loss of unrecorded plant knowledge and disappearing Indigenous languages threatens irreplaceable medical discoveries, rainforest ecology, and ancestral healing traditions.

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Dennis McKenna is a world renowned ethnobotanist, ethnopharmacologist, research pharmacologist, author, and founding board member of the Heffter Research Institute.  A prominent voice in plant medicine, he has appeared in documentaries such as Netflix's Fantastic Fungi and collaborated extensively with ethnobotanist Wade Davis on landmark texts and conservation programs through the McKenna Academy of Natural Philosophy.

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New Brunswick film maker Greg Hemmings has been working with Dr McKenna for years creating a number of short documentary films about the work of the Academy in its efforts to preserve and document important Amazonian plant species and their link to local culture. He has also immersed himself in the wonders of medicinal plants and their use.

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