David Abram | Becoming Animal | Philosopher, cultural ecologist and author of The Spell of the Sensuous shares new book

David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous—hailed as “revolutionary” by the Los Angeles Times, as “daring and truly original” by Science—has become a classic of environmental literature. Tonight he returns with Becoming Animal, a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature. As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make clear the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the land. For too long, Abram argues, we’ve inured ourselves to the intelligence of our flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. Becoming Animal seeks to subvert that distance, to draw readers deeper into their own animal senses in order to explore the elemental kinship between the body and the breathing Earth. The shapeshifting of ravens, the erotic nature of gravity, the eloquence of thunder, the pleasures of being edible—all have their place in Abram’s investigation. He shows that from the awakened perspective of the human animal, awareness is not an exclusive possession of our species but a lucid quality of the biosphere itself. Abram's essays have appeared in Orion, Environmental Ethics, Parabola, and The Ecologist. He is the recipient of the international Lannan Literary Award and founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics.