Between the Human Animal and the Animate Earth (in English)

Breathe in, breathe out. In this speech David Abram talks about what usually stays unnoticed - the omnipresent invisible mass of air we are immersed in. He talks about the air as an organ of the Earth, its sacredness; about climate as the commonwealth of breath as well as about the affinity between air and awareness. Is consciousness really the special possession of our species, or is it rather a property of the breathing biosphere in which we all participate?

David Abram is a cultural ecologist and philosopher and founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. He is best known for his work bridging the philosophical tradition of phenomenology with environmental and ecological issues. David is the author of Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-human World. His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of ecological disarray have appeared in a number of publications and anthologies. Abram coined the phrase “the more-than-human world” as a way of referring to earthly nature, a term that has become a key phrase within the lingua franca of the broad ecological movement.

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