1. Creaturely Migrations on a Breathing Planet

David Abram, cultural ecologist and geophilosopher, is the author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World (1996) and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (2010). Hailed as 'revolutionary' by the Los Angeles Times, and as 'daring' and 'truly original' by Science, Abram's work has been catalytic for the emergence of several new disciplines, including the steadily growing field of ecopsychology (in both its clinical and its research branches). His essays on the cultural causes and consequences of environmental disarray are published in numerous magazines, scholarly journals, and anthologies. A recipient of the international Lannan Literary Award, as well as fellowships from the Rockefeller and the Watson Foundations, in 2014 Abram held the international Arne Næss Chair in Global Justice and Ecology at the University of Oslo. Abram's work engages the ecological depths of the imagination, exploring the ways in which sensory perception, language, and wonder inform the relation between the human body and the breathing earth. His philosophical craft is informed by his fieldwork with Indigenous peoples in southeast Asia and the Americas, as well as by the European tradition of phenomenology. His ideas are often discussed and debated (sometimes heatedly) within the pages of various academic journals, including Environmental Ethics and the Journal of Environmental Philosophy.Abram was the first contemporary philosopher to advocate for a reappraisal of 'animism' as a complexly nuanced and uniquely viable worldview, one which roots human cognition in the dynamic sentience of the body while affirming the ongoing entanglement of our bodily experience with the uncanny intelligence of other animals, each of whom encounters the same world that we perceive yet from an outrageously different angle and perspective. A close student of the Traditional Ecological Knowledges (TEK) of diverse Indigenous peoples, Abram's work also articulates the entwinement of human subjectivity with the varied sensitivities of the many plants upon which we depend, as well as with the agency and dynamism of the particular places, or bioregions, that surround and sustain our communities. In recent years, Abram's work has come to be associated with a broad movement loosely termed 'New Materialism', due to his espousal of a radically transformed sense of matter and materiality. A Distinguished Fellow of Schumacher College in England, Abram is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), a consortium of individuals and organizations dedicated to cultural metamorphosis through a rejuvenation of place-based oral culture. He lives with his two children in the foothills of the southern Rockies.