Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emmanuel Vaughn Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

In each issue, we feature in-depth interviews, narrated essays, and stories, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

David Abram is a cultural ecologist and philosopher.

He is the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics.

His books include Becoming Animal, an Earthly Cosmology,

and The Spell of the Sensuous, Perception and language in a more than human world.

At the intersection of two seemingly opposing trends, techno-optimism and ecological despair,

David Abram undertakes an exploration of animism, the perception that everything has the capacity for meaningful expression.

While animism once brought us into deep relationship with the greater than human reality,

David wonders of the consequences of modern technologies,

which have focused our attention to non-human expression with the machines of our own making,

thus silencing the living, breathing world around us.

A hallmark of the puzzling era we're now living through

is a remarkable juxtaposition of two apparently contrary trends.

In many social circles, there exists a buoyant sense of possibility,

an upbeat and expectant optimism with regard to the near and long-term future. Yet in other societal spheres, a spreading despondency

weighs folks down whenever they contemplate our collective future, an overwhelming hopelessness that interferes with their

ability to even envision a livable future, a generation or two, from now.

These very different collective moods are generally, although not always, carried by different

groups of people. Those who spend a majority of their time engaged with new media, or who rarely venture

outside the bustling life of our large cities, are witness and sometimes party to the

...