For this edition of High Times Greats, we have an exclusive (and timely) interview with Jerry Garcia of the Grateful Dead by Legs McNeil, originally published in the February, 1989 issue of High Times.
When the rainforests go, so will we. Forget about nuclear holocaust for a second. Imagine what the world will be like when ecological calamity hits—worldwide famine, a lack of oxygen, the complete disappearance of fresh water, and the Greenhouse Effect gone mad. This time, it won’t be restricted to some natives in Africa. We’re talking worldwide dustbowl. Valuable plant and animal species that produce substances that have potential as cures for cancer, AIDS, and other diseases will be gone forever as well.
The statistics are staggering—one hundred acres of the world’s tropical rainforests, roughly the size of about 20 football fields, are destroyed every minute. Half of the tropical rainforests on this earth are already permanently destroyed. Scientists predict, at the rate of present destruction, all rainforests will be gone by the year 2050, just sixty years from today. Tropical rainforests are the richest, oldest, most productive, and most complex ecosystems on earth. While they comprise only two percent of the globe, they support an estimated five million plant, animal, and insect species, as well as many indigenous people who can survive nowhere else.
On Tuesday, September 13, 1988, Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, and Mickey Hart from the Grateful Dead, as well as Dr. Jason Clay, the director of Cultural Survival, Peter Bahouth, the Chairman of Greenpeace USA, and Randall Hayes, the Director of the Rainforest Action Network, sat down at the panel in conference room four of the United Nations and alerted the world’s press to the horror of the vanishing rainforest. When