Welcome to Emergence Magazine's podcast.

I'm Emanuel Von Lee, executive editor of Emergence Magazine.

Each week, we feature a new interview, narrated essay, or story, exploring the threads connecting ecology, culture, and spirituality.

Thank you. culture, and spirituality. David Abram is a cultural ecologist and philosopher,

whose work on animism over the last 25 years has been highly influential in the field of ecology.

His books include becoming animal and earthly cosmology and the spell of ecology. His books include becoming animal, an earthly cosmology, and the spell

of the sensuous, perception, and language in a more than human world, and is a frequent contributor

to emergence. I sat down with David to discuss the animism, power, and potency at the heart of the living world.

In our current moment of ecological and societal instability,

rich with possibility and fraught with potential danger,

he calls on us to remember the animacy of our own bodily senses

and our inherent participation in the collective embodied flesh

of the earth.

David, a lot of your work talks about perception, sensory perception, ecology of perception. And I wonder if you could start

by talking to us a little bit about perception and how that is connected to your work.

Yeah. Well, I think as a cultural ecologist, what I'm primarily known for is work, research, investigations into the ecology of perception

or the ecology of sensory experience.

That is, the way the activity of our eyes, of our ears, of our tongue, our nostrils, functions to bind our separate

nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem, as though our animal senses actually work

almost like a kind of glue binding our individual nervous system into the wider

ecology, the wider ecosystem. But I'm also convinced that there are ways of speaking that many

of us have inherited from this curious culture into which we were born, ways of speaking that work to stifle

...