David Abram is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World, and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. Described as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David’s work engages the ecological depths of experience, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and imagination inform the relation between the human animal and the animate earth. He was perhaps the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of indigenous “animism” as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview – a broad reassessment which is now dramatically underway in many disciplines.
In the mid-1990s David coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” in order to speak of nature as a realm that thoroughly includes humankind, yet also necessarily exceeds humankind; the phrase has now been taken up worldwide within the broad movement for ecological sanity.
Currently the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard Divinity School, David recently held the international Arne Naess Chair of Global Justice and Ecology in Norway. He has received numerous awards, including Rockefeller and Watson Fellowships, and the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. David is co-founder and Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), and a distinguished teaching Fellow of Schumacher College in England. He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.