David Abram, Ph.D.

David Abram, cultural ecologist and philosopher, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Pantheon/Vintage), for which he received the international Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. An accomplished storyteller and 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 often in such journals as Environmental Ethics, Parabola, Tikkun, Orion, Wild Earth, Resurgence, and The Ecologist, as well as in many edited anthologies in a wide range of disciplines. David has been the recipient of fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Watson Foundations, and has been named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world. His work focuses upon the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray; upon the experiential effects of technological change; and upon the ecological depths of the imagination -- exploring the ways in which sensory perception, poetics, and wonder inform our relation with the animate earth.

In recent years the Orion Society and the New England Aquarium sponsored a large public debate between David Abram and distinguished biologist E. O. Wilson, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, on science and ethics. Last year David was invited to give the final keynote address for the United Nations World Environment Day, to 75 mayors from the largest cities around the world. The address was given under the towering redwood trees at Muir Woods, at the very spot where the United Nations charter was originally signed into being sixty years earlier.

David is founder and director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE). He lives in northern New Mexico, where he maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication, and in the rejuvenation of oral culture.