David Abram

Born in the suburbs of New York City, Abram studied at Wesleyan University while performing as a sleight-of-hand 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 travelled throughout Southeast Asia as a magician, studying with traditional magic practitioners (or medicine persons) 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 from native communities in the Southwest desert and the Pacific Northwest. A 1984 essay written while studying biology at the Yale School of Forestry titled "The Perceptual Implications of Gaia" brought Abram into association with the scientists formulating the Gaia hypothesis; he was soon lecturing in tandem with Lynn Margulis and James Lovelock in Britain and the United States. In the late 1980s Abram turned his attention to exploring the 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.

Abram's writing is informed by his work with indigenous peoples, 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 evolving work has also been influenced by his close friendships with Lynn Margulis, and the James Hillman — as well as by his esteem for the poet Gary Snyder and novelist Wendell Berry.

Writing in the mid-nineteen nineties, 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" itself, as contrasted with "culture"), Abram coined the phrase "the more-than-human world" in order to signify a realm that includes humankind and its culture, but also other organisms. The phrase was intended, first and foremost, to indicate that the human world was sustained, surrounded and permeated by other organisms — yet by the phrase Abram also meant to encourage a 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 the central term for "nature" in his 1996 book (subtitled Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World) the phrase was gradually adopted by others in environmentalism.[4] In an afterword for a 2013 book, Abram has referred to the more-than-human world as "the commonwealth of breath".[5]

The publication of "The Spell of the Sensuous" was catalytic to the formation and consolidation of several new disciplines, especially the burgeoning field of ecopsychology (both as a theoretical discipline and as therapeutic practice), as well as ecophenomenology and ecolinguistics.

Since 1996, Abram has lectured and taught at universities throughout the world, although he is not employed in academia. He was named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world,[6] His ideas have often been debated (sometimes heatedly) within the pages of various academic journals, including Environmental Ethics, Environmental Values and the Journal of Environmental Philosophy[7] In 2001, the New England Aquarium and the Orion Society sponsored a large public debate between Abram and biologist E. O. Wilson in Boston on science and ethics. (An essay by Abram that grew out of that debate, entitled "Earth in Eclipse," has been published in several versions). In the summer of 2005, Abram delivered a keynote address for the United Nations "World Environment Week" in San Francisco, to 70 mayors from the largest cities around the world.

In 2006, Abram—together with Stephan Harding, Per Espen Stoknes and Per Ingvar Haukeland—founded the non-profit Alliance for Wild Ethics, for which he serves as creative director. According to their website the Alliance is a consortium of individuals and organizations working to ease the spreading devastation of the environment through a rapid transformation of culture. The organisation employs the arts, often in tandem with the natural sciences, to provoke shifts in the human experience of nature.

In 2010 Abram published Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology,[3] which was the sole runner-up for the PEN Edward O. Wilson Award for Literary Science Writing. A review in Orion magazine by Potowatami elder, Robin Wall Kimmerer described the book thus: "Prose as lush as a moss-draped rain forest and as luminous as a high desert night... Deeply resonant with indigenous ways of knowing, Becoming Animal lets us listen in on wordless conversations with ancient boulders, walruses, birds, and roof beams", while in the UK, a review in the magazine Resurgence said: "Without doubt one of America's greatest nature writers, one who ably follows in the footsteps of Muir, Thoreau and Leopold". In 2014 Abram held the Arne Næss Chair of Global Justice and Environment at the University of Oslo. In that same year he became a distinguished Fellow of Schumacher College, where he teaches regularly. He also teaches a week-long intensive each summer on Cortes Island, in British Columbia. Abram lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.