David Abram

David Abram, cultural ecologist and geophilosopher, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, among other works. Described as "revolutionary" by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David's work explores the ecological depths of experience, articulating the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human animal and the animate earth. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind (with all our culture and artifice), yet necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up as a key term within the worldwide movement for ecological sanity. Abram has been the recipient of numerous awards, including the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction, and has held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology in Norway. David is co-founder of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), and a distinguished Fellow of Schumacher College in England; he lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies. Dr. Abram was perhaps the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of "animism" as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview, one which roots human cognition in the dynamic sentience of the body while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodied intelligence with the uncanny sentience of other animals. A close student of the traditional ecological knowledge of diverse indigenous peoples, his work also articulates the entwinement of human subjectivity with the varied sensitivities of the plants upon whom we depend, as well as with the agency of the particular places (or bioregions) that surround and sustain our communities. Our unique modalities of mind, Abram suggests, simply cannot be understood in isolation from the material dynamism and fragility of the breathing Earth.