Introductory Overviews

  • Depth Ecology

    by David Abram
    Deep ecology, as a movement and a way of thinking, has commonly been contrasted to conventional environmentalism, and especially to approaches that focus only on alleviating the most obvious symptoms of ecological disarray without reflecting upon, and seeking to transform, the more deep-seated cultural assumptions and practices that have given rise to those problems. Rather ...
  • Waking Our Animal Senses

    Language and the Ecology of Sensory Experience

    by David Abram
    I’m beginning these thoughts during the winter solstice, the dark of the year, during a night so long that even the trees and the rocks are falling asleep. Moon has glanced at us through the thick blanket of clouds once or twice, but mostly left us to dream and drift through the shadowed night. Those ...
  • Storytelling and Wonder

    On the Rejuvenation of Oral Culture

    by David Abram
    In the prosperous land where I live, a mysterious task is underway to invigorate the minds of the populace, and to vitalize the spirits of our children. For a decade, now, parents, politicians, and educators of all forms have been raising funds to bring computers into every household in the realm, and into every classroom ...
  • Coming To Our (Animal) Senses

    A Dark Mountain conversation between David Abram and Dougald Hine

    by Dougald Hine, David Abram
    Intro by Dougald Hine: In the opening pages of The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram stands in the night outside his hut in Bali, the stars spread across the sky, mirrored from below in the water of the rice paddies, and countless fireflies dancing in between. This disorientating abundance of wonder is close to what ...

Extended Forays in Depth Ecology

  • Earth in Eclipse

    an Essay on the Philosophy of Science and Ethics

    by David Abram
    There is another world, but it is in this one. — Paul Eluard As a fresh millennium dawns around us, a new and vital skill is waiting to be born in the human organism, a new talent called for by the curious situation in which much of humankind now finds itself. We may call it the skill ...
  • Reciprocity and the Salmon

    Water-borne Reflections from the Northwest Coast

    by David Abram
    1. The Lessons of Salmon My first encounter with spawning salmon gleams with a cool, moonlit radiance in my memory. I’d grown up in the suburban east coast and knew nothing of this wild fish and its mysterious ways. It was in the mid-eighties, and I was kayaking in the Prince William Sound a year or ...
  • In the Depths of a Breathing Planet

    Gaia and the Transformation of Experience

    by David Abram
    By providing a new way of viewing our planet – one which connects with some of our oldest and most primordial intuitions regarding the animate Earth – Gaia theory ultimately alters our understanding of ourselves, transforming our sense of what it means to be human. For much of the modern era, earthly nature was spoken ...

On Perceptual Ecology and Magic

  • Animism, Perception, and Earthly Craft of the Magician

    by David Abram
    Although the term “animism” was originally coined in the nineteenth century to designate the mistaken projection of humanlike attributes — such as life, mind, intelligence — to nonhuman and ostensibly inanimate phenomena, it is clear that this first meaning was itself rooted in a misapprehension, by Western scholars, of the perceptual experience of indigenous, oral ...
  • Making Magic

    by David Abram
    They told me I had powers. Powers? I had been a magician for seven years, performing steadily back in the States, entertaining in clubs and restaurants throughout the country, yet I had never heard anyone mention powers. To be sure, once or twice a season I was rebuked by some spectator fresh out of Bible school ...
  • Depth Ecology

    by David Abram
    Deep ecology, as a movement and a way of thinking, has commonly been contrasted to conventional environmentalism, and especially to approaches that focus only on alleviating the most obvious symptoms of ecological disarray without reflecting upon, and seeking to transform, the more deep-seated cultural assumptions and practices that have given rise to those problems. Rather ...

Ecological Philosophy and Philosophy of Science

  • Between the Body and the Breathing Earth

    A Reply to Ted Toadvine

    by David Abram
    …the whole of nature is the setting of our own life, and our interlocutor in a sort of dialogue.      — Maurice Merleau-Ponty Ted Toadvine(1) is an attentive scholar of the phenomenological movement, with an abiding interest in the work of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. His approach to phenomenology is considerably more conservative than my own, yet ...
  • Earth in Eclipse

    an Essay on the Philosophy of Science and Ethics

    by David Abram
    There is another world, but it is in this one. — Paul Eluard As a fresh millennium dawns around us, a new and vital skill is waiting to be born in the human organism, a new talent called for by the curious situation in which much of humankind now finds itself. We may call it the skill ...
  • Merleau-Ponty and the Voice of the Earth

    by David Abram
    Introduction Slowly, inexorably, members of our species are beginning to catch sight of a world that exists beyond the confines of our specific culture—beginning to recognize, that is, that our own personal, social, and political crises reflect a growing crisis in the biological matrix of life on the planet. The ecological crisis may be the result ...

Key Quotes

  • some key quotes from Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

    by David Abram
    pages 4—8: Is it possible to grow a worthy cosmology by attending closely to our encounters with other creatures, and with the elemental textures and contours of our locale? We are by now so accustomed to the cult of expertise that the very notion of honoring and paying heed to our directly felt experience of things—of ...
  • some key quotes from The Spell of the Sensuous

    by David Abram
    Caught up in a mass of abstractions, our attention hypnotized by a host of human-made technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves, it is all too easy for us to forget our carnal inherence in a more-than-human matrix of sensations and sensibilities. Our bodies have formed themselves in delicate reciprocity with the manifold textures, ...

Gaian Essays

  • The Perceptual Implications of Gaia

    by David Abram
    The Gaia hypothesis represents a unique moment in scientific thought: the first glimpse, from within the domain of pure and precise science, that this planet might best be described as a coherent, living entity. The hypothesis itself arose in an attempt to make sense of certain anomalous aspects of the Earth’s atmosphere. It suggests that ...
  • The Mechanical and the Organic

    On the Impact of Metaphor in Science

    by David Abram
    Many scientists and theorists claim that the Gaia hypothesis is merely a fancy name for a set of interactions, between organisms and their presumably inorganic environment, that have long been known to science. Every high school student is familiar with the fact that the oxygen content of the atmosphere is dependent on the photosynthetic activity ...
  • Gaia and Biodiversity

    by Stephan Harding
    Biodiversity is the diversity of life at various levels of organisation, ranging from genes, species, ecosystems, biomes and landscapes. As far as we can tell, the Earth just before the appearance of modern humans was the most biodiverse it has ever been during the three and a half billion years of life’s tenure on this ...
  • Water Gaia

    Three and a half thousand million years of wetness on planet Earth

    by Stephan Harding, Lynn Margulis
    Our thesis: Life has retained planetary water. We champion the poorly developed Gaian view that life has vigorously helped maintain abundant water on the Earth’s surface over the last three and a half thousand million years. We defend the idea that life’s populations persist and continue to expand on Earth not because of any “lucky accident” ...
  • In the Depths of a Breathing Planet

    Gaia and the Transformation of Experience

    by David Abram
    By providing a new way of viewing our planet – one which connects with some of our oldest and most primordial intuitions regarding the animate Earth – Gaia theory ultimately alters our understanding of ourselves, transforming our sense of what it means to be human. For much of the modern era, earthly nature was spoken ...

Language, Poetics, and Oral Tradition

  • Myth Is a Theorem About the Nature of Reality:

    Robert Bringhurst interviewed by Matthew Spellberg

    by Robert Bringhurst
    The scholar of Native American literature on the vivid tradition of Haida poetry. Robert Bringhurst is a poet, linguist, translator, and essayist who has championed, in a series of remarkable books and lectures, the literary heritage of Native American culture. He’s made it his calling to enroll oral mythtelling in the canon of world literature, arguing ...
  • Gary Snyder and the Renewal of Oral Culture

    by David Abram
    What a pleasure to have this chance to ponder this marvelous, and marvelously strange, poem cycle — “Mountains and Rivers Without End”— by our friend Gary Snyder. I must admit the poem has had me flummoxed and befuddled.  Yet I was immediately taken with the animistic terrain of these pages. This shifting, metamorphic realm where everything ...
  • The Riddle of the Twins

    by David Abram
    Here is a riddle that was posed to me by my friend and colleague, the meso-american shaman and poet Martin Prechtel: “Into the fresh blond hair of the young rain deities, The twins drop to retrieve their parents’ face. One disappears in order to hold the other, Whose death as well, feeds the world in a jeweled return through smoke, and ...
  • Prayer

    by David Abram
    May a good vision catch me May a benevolent vision take hold of me, and move me May a deep and full vision come over me, and burst open around me May a luminous vision inform me, enfold me. May I awaken into the story that surrounds, May I awaken into the beautiful story. May the wondrous story find me; May the ...
  • Storytelling and Wonder

    On the Rejuvenation of Oral Culture

    by David Abram
    In the prosperous land where I live, a mysterious task is underway to invigorate the minds of the populace, and to vitalize the spirits of our children. For a decade, now, parents, politicians, and educators of all forms have been raising funds to bring computers into every household in the realm, and into every classroom ...

Interviews and Dialogues

Essays by Per Espen Stoknes

  • Eairth’s Imagination

    Rooting the Expressive Arts in the Elemental Creativity of the Biosphere

    by Per Espen Stoknes
    This essay will basically explore three statements: First, We live in the imagination. Second, this imagi-nation, a nation of images, arises from the autonomy of the image. And thirdly, the place where this image-magic is finding place, is, quite simply, the air. Taken together these three have the potential, I propose, to transform our relationships to ...
  • Relating to Climate Change

    Apocalypse Soon?

    by Per Espen Stoknes
    I’ve been away from the city for a long time. Driving through the countryside, I have seen red barns and the occasional industrial building as I pass by. After passing the airport where the monthly number of departures recently reached an all-time high, the density of cars and lanes on the highway increase as well. ...

Essays by Stephan Harding

  • My Private Jungle

    by Stephan Harding
      I have a jungle. Not a tropical jungle – just a small, temperate forest jungle in Devon, South West England. It started out 25 years ago as a vegetable garden next to our cottage at Schumacher College when I first came here after almost three years of work as an ecologist in Costa Rica, and ...
  • Towards an Animistic Science of the Earth

    by Stephan Harding
      Introduction   At first sight, science and animism appear to be irreconcilable. Whereas over the last four centuries science has held sway with the view that nature is nothing more than a vast lifeless mechanism that can be understood and controlled by means of experiment and detached analytical reasoning, ‘animists’, in their various guises (including shamans, poets, ...
  • Educating for Gaia

    by Stephan Harding
    As the ecological and social crises bite deeper and deeper into the fabric of our lives, there is an urgent need for an education that addresses the question of how we can develop lifestyles that are truly sustainable in the ecological sense of the word.  Good science teaching is an essential component of this educational ...

New Technical Papers on the Science of Gaia

  • Gaia and Biodiversity

    by Stephan Harding
    Biodiversity is the diversity of life at various levels of organisation, ranging from genes, species, ecosystems, biomes and landscapes. As far as we can tell, the Earth just before the appearance of modern humans was the most biodiverse it has ever been during the three and a half billion years of life’s tenure on this ...
  • Water Gaia

    Three and a half thousand million years of wetness on planet Earth

    by Stephan Harding, Lynn Margulis
    Our thesis: Life has retained planetary water. We champion the poorly developed Gaian view that life has vigorously helped maintain abundant water on the Earth’s surface over the last three and a half thousand million years. We defend the idea that life’s populations persist and continue to expand on Earth not because of any “lucky accident” ...