David Abram

Abram's writing is informed by his work with indigenous people, as well as by the American nature-writing tradition that stems from Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, and Mary Austin. His philosophical work is informed by the European tradition of phenomenology — in particular, by the work of the French phenomenologist, Maurice Merleau-Ponty. Abram's work has been influenced by his friendships with the archetypal psychologist James Hillman and with the evolutionary biologist, Lynn Margulis — as well as by his esteem for the poet Gary Snyder and the writer Wendell Berry.

The publication of The Spell of the Sensuous is claimed to have induced the formation of the new disciplines of ecopsychology, ecophenomenology and ecological linguistics. The French translation of the text was completed by the Belgian Isabelle Stengers in 2013.

In 2010 Abram published Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, which was the sole runner-up for the inaugural PEN Edward O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing, and a finalist for the Orion Book Award. In 2014 Abram held the Arne Næss Chair of Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo, Norway. In that same year he became a distinguished fellow of Schumacher College, where he regularly teaches. He also teaches a week-long intensive each summer on Cortes Island in British Columbia. The father of two teenage children, Abram lives in the southern USA.

Abram was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world, and profiled in the 2007 book, Visionaries: The 20th Century's 100 Most Inspirational Leaders. His ideas have been debated within the pages of academic journals such as Environmental Ethics and Environmental Values. In 2001 the New England Aquarium and the Orion Society sponsored a public debate on science and ethics between Abram and biologist E. O. Wilson at the old Town Hall in Boston. An essay by Abram grew out of that debate, Earth in Eclipse.

In 2006 Abram, together with biologist Stephan Harding, ecopsychologist Per Espen Stoknes, and environmental educator Per Ingvar Haukeland, founded the non-profit Alliance for Wild Ethics, for which he serves as creative director. The non-profit promotes the use of art to support environmentalism.

Writing in the mid-1990s, finding himself frustrated by the problematic terminology of environmentalism -tired of the conceptual gulf between humankind and the rest of nature tacitly implied by the use of conventional terms like "environment" and even by the word "nature", as contrasted with "culture", Abram coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" in order to define the broad commonwealth of earthly life, a realm that includes humankind and its culture, but which exceeds human culture. The phrase was intended to indicate that human culture was a subset within a larger set — that the human world was necessarily sustained, surrounded, and permeated by the more-than-human world — yet by the phrase Abram also meant to encourage a new humility on the part of humankind (since the "more" could be taken not just in a quantitative but also in a qualitative sense). Upon introducing the phrase as a central term in his 1996 book the phrase was gradually adopted by many other theorists and activists. In his afterword for the compilation Material Ecocriticism Abram calls his more-than-human world the "breathing commonwealth" and the "commonwealth of breath".

Born in the suburbs of New York City, Abram began studying at Wesleyan University while performing as a magician. After his second year of college, Abram took a year off to travel as an itinerant street magician through Europe and the Middle East; toward the end of that journey, in London, he began exploring the application of sleight-of-hand magic to psychotherapy under the guidance of R. D. Laing. After graduating summa cum laude from Wesleyan in 1980, Abram traveled throughout Southeast Asia as an magician, studying with traditional magic practitioners in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, and Nepal. Upon returning to North America he continued performing while devoting himself to the study of natural history and ethno-ecology, visiting native communities in the Southwest desert and the Pacific Northwest. An essay written while studying biology at the Yale School of Forestry in 1984 titled The Perceptual Implications of Gaia brought Abram into association with the scientists formulating the Gaia Hypothesis; he was soon lecturing in tandem with biologist Lynn Margulis and geochemist James Lovelock in Britain and the United States. In the late 1980s Abram turned his attention to exploring the decisive influence of language upon the human senses and upon our sensory experience of the land around us. Abram received a doctorate for this work from the State University of New York at Stony Brook, in 1993.

David Abram (born June 24, 1957) is an American writer about environmentalism and a performance artist, best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmentalism. He is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2010) and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (1996), for which he received the Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction. Abram is a founder and the creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics; his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disruption have appeared in such magazines as Orion, Environmental Ethics, Parabola, Tikkun and The Ecologist.