Synergetic Press opened its first offices in 1969 in Santa Fe, New Mexico and in 1984 in London. After more than forty years of fiercely independent publishing we still believe that our job as publishers is to advance the most relevant and far-reaching work we can find. Thus we bring you titles such as Birth of a Psychedelic Culture, by Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner, and John Allen’s Me and the Biospheres. These are people whose thinking has impacted the world as we know it today; their experiments and projects have been vitally important to comprehensively understand our consciousness and our biosphere.

We publish works that are timeless, and we keep them in print. Since our inception one of our primary concerns has been the relationship between people and the environment. Hence our backlist includes books such as Vine of the Soul: Medicine Men, their Plants and Ritural in the Colombian Amazonia, by Richard Evans Schultes and Robert F. Raffauf; Where the Gods Reign: Plants and Peoples of the Colombian Amazon, also by Schultes; and White Gold: Diary of a Rubber Cutter in Brazil 1906 – 1916, by John C. Yungjohann. As everyone knows, the Amazon rainforest today is only a shadow of its former self. Without titles like these, written by people who not only visited the Amazon but made it their home for some part of their lives, we would have very little record of what the Amazon once was, how it came to change and what these changes mean as we consider current environmental issues.

Our readers may notice there are often ties between our titles. For instance, Richard Evans Schultes, the author of Vine of the Soul, was a mentor at Harvard to Timothy Leary, Ram Dass and Ralph Metzner. In fact, his stories of indigenous peoples’ rituals in the rainforest inspired some of the experiments recounted in their Birth of a Psychedelic Culture. And Ira Cohen happened to be on the same ship that would begin Johnny Dolphin’s exploration of the "extraordinary planet." We published Ira Cohen’s first book of poetry way back in 1980 and went on to earn a well-deserved reputation as one of the greatest visionary poets of the last half century.The creation of Biosphere 2 by John Allen (also known as poet Johnny Dolphin) could be said to be a continuation of the pioneering work of seminal Russo-Ukrainian scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, whose essays on Geochemistry and the Biosphere we released in the first authoritative English translation.

Every one of our authors has made a significant contribution to our understanding of the world we live in. There is a very real “synergy” to our selections. Our writers inspire one another and inspire their readers. In an age of apathy and materialism, our authors challenge readers to want more for themselves and their planet and to rise to their fullest potential as mindful individuals.

Sincerely,

Deborah Parrish Snyder