David Abram is an cultural ecologist and philosopher whose work has had a deepening influence on the environmental movement in North America and abroad. He is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon/Vintage) -- a book which helped catalyze the new field of eco-psychology. An accomplished sleight-of-hand magician who has lived and traded magic with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal, and the Americas, David lectures and teaches widely on several continents. His essays have appeared in such journals as Orion, Tikkun, Parabola, Environmental Ethics, Adbusters, Resurgence, and The Ecologist, as well as in numerous anthologies. David has been the recipient of numerous awards, including fellowships from the Watson and Rockefeller foundations and the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction; he was also was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world. His current work engages the ecological depths of the imagination -- exploring the ways in which perception, poetics, and wonder inform our relation with the animate earth.

Recently the New England Aquarium sponsored a large public debate between David Abram and biologist Edward O. Wilson, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, on science and the nature of ethics. David founded the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE) in his home terrain of northern New Mexico; he maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication, and in the rejuvenation of oral culture.

Read a chapter from David Abram's The Spell of the Sensuous"

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