Reader’s Corner

Each year, the Orion Book Award honors five books that deepen our connection to the natural world in fresh and surprising ways. Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology, by David Abram, recognizes that notions of human separateness are false in the first place.

Consider your body. Consider the flick of your eyelids, the slope of your shoulders, the humidity between your toes. Consider gravity’s pull on your skeleton, the powers alive in the muscles of your thighs. Consider the atmospheric trading post inside your chest, and the small winds, just now, building there.

Meditation on the body, on the validity of felt experience, is the subject of David Abram’s Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology—an intricately textured, deep breath of a book that blurs the boundaries between human and animal, mind and earth. For Abram, nothing is inert—tree roots are toes squelching mud after a rain—and every border is permeable. “The human body is not a closed or static object,” he writes, “but an open, unfinished entity utterly entwined with the soils, waters, and winds that move through it—a wild creature whose life is contingent upon the multiple other lives that surround it, and the shifting flows that surge through it.”

Abram’s intense scrutiny of the ground in front of him highlights the degree to which we miss all of this richness by peering, as we do, through symbols and representations—through screens, numbers, words, concepts—that remove us from authentic experience. We don’t trust the physical world. Give us an equation or a theory, we say; falling rain, pounding hearts, flickering stars—these are illusions. But for Abram, objectivity is bunk. There can be no detached intellect. “The brain did not evolve in order to understand itself,” Abram reminds us. “There is NO view from outside.”

About the Author
David Abram is an ecologist, anthropologist, and philosopher who lectures widely around the world. He is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous, for which he received a Lannan Literary Award for Nonfiction; his essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental turmoil are published in numerous magazines, scholarly journals, and anthologies. David is cofounder and Director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE). He lives with his family in the foothills of the southern Rockies.

Learn More
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology
By David Abram
Pantheon, 2010. Kindle edition available.

Read an excerpt from Becoming Animal
Read an excerpt from Spell of the Sensuous

Flight From Embodiment from Alliance for Wild Ethics on Vimeo.