Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology

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David Abram is a cultural ecologist and environmental philosopher named by Utne Reader as one of one hundred visionaries transforming the world. 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. In his latest book, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, Abram returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.

For most of our human existence, we relied on our animal senses and our collective knowledge about the natural world for our very survival. But with the rapid growth of science and technology, we as individuals have relinquished more and more of this knowledge to experts, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. It’s understandable, the author points out, that we abstract our physical selves and seek sanctuary in virtual worlds. But in doing so, we renounce our storehouse of “mammalian intelligence” and our citizenship in the natural world.

Abram’s writing seeks to rectify this alienation by drawing readers ever closer to their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinship between the human body and the sentient Earth. In thirteen chapters, the author builds a new way of looking at and interacting with the natural world. Abram’s book begins with a musing about shadow and its depth, flows through tales of encounters with whales and shamans, and ends by making the crucial connection between this disconnect between humans and our environment and our ability to destroy it unchecked and seemingly without remorse. Abram writes that we can’t “restore” nature without “restorying” life, hence his extraordinary, provocative, and rectifying “earthly cosmology.” To learn more, look inside Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology.