Described as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times and “daring” and “truly original” by the journal Science, David Abram’s work explores the myriad ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth.
David’s essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray are published in numerous magazines, scholarly journals, and anthologies. He has been the recipient of many fellowships and awards, including the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction.
David recently held the international Arne Naess Chair in Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo in Norway and was the Senior Visiting Scholar in Ecology and Natural Philosophy at Harvard University in 2022-2023. His work engages the ecological depths of the imagination and is informed by his fieldwork with indigenous peoples in southeast Asia and the Americas, as well as by the philosophical tradition of phenomenology.
In the 1990s, David was 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 bodily experience with the uncanny intelligence of other animals, each of whom encounters the same world that we perceive yet from an outrageously different angle and perspective.
David is a fellow of Schumacher College in England and founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE). He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.
