[david abram]
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David Abram — cultural ecologist, philosopher, and educator – is Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE). He 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. Mr. Abram is an accomplished storyteller and sleight-of-hand magician who has lived and traded magic with indigenous sorcerers in Indonesia, Nepal and the Americas. He began practicing sleight-of-hand magic in his late teens, and it is this craft that sparked his ongoing fascination with perception. When he was nineteen, Mr. Abram began working regularly as “house magician” at Alice’s Restaurant in Massachusetts, and soon was performing steadily in clubs throughout New England. He took a year off from his studies at Wesleyan University to journey as a street magician through Europe; upon graduating summa cum laude from Wesleyan in 1980, Mr. Abram began traveling as an itinerant magician throughout rural parts of Southeast Asia, living and studying with traditional magicians and medicine-persons in Sri Lanka, Indonesia and Nepal.

Mr. Abram became increasingly fascinated by the interactive relation between these traditional magicians and the various animals, plants, and natural elements that constitute the local terrain. Upon returning to North America, he became a careful student of natural history and ecology while continuing to perform throughout Canada and the United States. A much-reprinted essay originally published in The Ecologist (written while he was studying at the Yale School of Forestry in 1984), entitled “The Perceptual Implications of Gaia,” brought Mr. Abram into alliance with the scientists formulating the Gaia Hypothesis, and he was soon lecturing in association with biologist Lynn Margulis and geochemist James Lovelock in both Britain and the United States.

Mr. Abram lectures and teaches widely on several continents. His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared often in such journals as Environmental Ethics, Tikkun, Orion, Parabola, Adbusters and The Ecologist, as well as in many edited anthologies is a host of disciplines. Named by the Utne Reader as one of a hundred visionaries currently transforming the world, Mr. Abram has been the recipient of numerous honors, including fellowships from the Rockefeller and Watson Foundations. His work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, poetics, and wonder inform our relation with the animate earth. Mr. Abram lives with his family in northern New Mexico, where he maintains a passionate interest in interspecies communication, and in the rejuvenation of oral culture.

In recent years the New England Aquarium sponsored a large public debate between Mr. Abram and distinguished biologist Edward O. Wilson, at Faneuil Hall in Boston, on science and ethics. In 2005, Mr. Abram was invited to give the keynote address for the United Nations “World Environment Week” to 70 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.

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