Interbreathing Ecocultural Identity in the Humilocene

An interview with David Abram

by Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor. Originally published as chapter 1 of The Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity, edited by Milstein and Castro-Sotomayer, Routledge, 2020.

Cool Weather by AJ Casson

David Abram is a cultural ecologist and geophilosopher whose work has helped catalyze the emergence of several fields of study, including the burgeoning field of ecopsychology, along with ecophenomenology and ecolinguistics. He is author of The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World (Vintage, 1996) and Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology (Vintage, 2011). The former book is considered a generative work and continues to inform and inspire scholars across disciplines, and the latter is reflected in the 2018 film Becoming Animal, by Peter Mettler and Emma Davie. Abram also is founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics (AWE), a consortium that employs the arts and the natural sciences ‘to ease the spreading devastation of the animate earth through a rapid transformation of society,’ especially ‘through a rejuvenation of oral culture – the culture of face-to-face and face-to-place storytelling’ (http://davidabram.org/awe).

Abram’s work explores, first and foremost, the ecology of perception – the manifold ways that sensory experience binds our separate nervous systems into the encompassing ecosystem. This exploration has led him to engage, ever more deeply, the ecological dimensions of language – the manner in which ways of speaking profoundly influence and constrain what we see, and hear, and even taste of the Earth around us. Abram works to alter our directly felt experience of the world by transforming the ways language today is dominantly used. Through the weaving of his own words, his writing brings the world alive in ways that can excite and nourish earthly spiritual and sensual engagements and identifications. For instance, while writing in the mid-1990s, he found himself frustrated by problematic terminology within environmentalist movements that reinforced the dominant Western culturally constructed divide between humankind and what commonly is referred to as ‘nature’ or ‘the environment.’ In response, in 1996, Abram coined the phrase ‘the more-than-human world’ to signify the broad commonwealth of earthly life, a realm that both contains humankind and yet also, necessarily, exceeds humankind and human culture. The term has been gradually adopted by many other scholars and theorists (you will see ‘more-than-human world’ informing the discussion of ecocultural identity throughout this Handbook) and has crossed into the practitioner realm to become a key term within the paradigm-shifting phrasing of activists and the broader ecological movement.

Abram’s work is deeply resonant with the Routledge Handbook of Ecocultural Identity’s intention of understanding and addressing contemporary ecocultures and ecocultural identities and of offering alternative ways of thinking and feeling at once ancient and strangely new. As a pivotal contemporary thinker who lectures and teaches around the world both within and outside academia, we asked Abram to join and help frame the ecocultural identity conversation. The following is a transcript of a conversation with the Handbook’s editors, Tema Milstein and José Castro-Sotomayor, in Abram’s home in the southern foothills of the United States Rocky Mountains.

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MILSTEIN: Identity is manifesting centrally in society and politics right now, driving activisms and organizing on the ground and informing major regime and policy changes. At the same time, a lot of activisms, politics, and much social science and humanities research around identity continue to focus exclusively on sociocultural aspects. The conversation in this Handbook, in part, responds to ways this tendency leaves out the more-than-human world and, in many cases, reproduces and leave unchallenged the dominant Western human/‘nature’ binary at the heart of today’s related ecological and social crises.

ABRAM: Yes indeed. Our identity as animals, for instance, or as citizens of this breathing biosphere, are completely left out of account.

MILSTEIN: And since identity is transdisciplinary and also often non-academic, many people in different contexts around the world are part of this conversation. We felt now is a time to expand the scope of the conversation and ask: What does identity mean when we take into account humans always being ecological and, equally, society and culture always being ecological?

ABRAM: Wonderful. So often our internecine human conflicts – our readiness to take offense at perceived slights in relation to some identity or other – come in the way of and interrupt any felt discovery of our shared dependence upon the Earth, our shared interdependence with other creatures and plants and earthly elements. I often think that we use identity conflicts to hide, or avoid noticing, what’s really at stake today – which is our deeper identity as parts of Earth. There’s been so much violence toward or between or against particular groups, violations and affronts, marginalizations and erasures that must indeed be recognized, acknowledged, and – to whatever extent possible – accounted for, apologized for, even atoned for. But we do not have time for all of these affronts in their specificity to be recognized clearly before we begin noticing the collective assault – to which most if not all of us contribute – on the biosphere itself, the collective desecration of our larger Body.

            A key and obvious problem with putting so much weight on our particular sociocultural identities is that they can inhibit our flexibility and fluidity. Identity gets a lot of people locating themselves within a set of defined boundaries, rather than affirming and recognizing themselves as outrageously fluid composites, composed of so many different voices, all these different trajectories that flow together here to create ‘me’ at any moment. In our ways of construing what it is to be human, we’ve been leaving out so much of who we are, forgetting our interdependence with so many other shapes and styles of sensitivity and sentience.

            It can be very disturbing to realize that we’re not just a part of something so much bigger than ourselves, but we are immersed in it – embedded within a world wherein there are many other beings out and about that are bigger than us, that can eat us, and even beings who are much smaller than us (microbial organisms around and within us) who can, and ultimately will, take us down. That is to say, there are innumerable reasons to be frightened of this earthly biosphere or distressed at having to notice our utter embedment within this wild cauldron of life churning with powers that we are in many ways beholden to. And so I reckon that there’s a reflexive impulse to hide from our inherence in this cauldron, to find some way to pretend it’s not there, to turn away from the teeming multitude of beings toward others who look just like us – toward others of our own species – and to find other ways to get caught up in the purely human discourse, both by celebrating those folks we identify with and by being affronted and doing battle against other persons and factions that annoy us. It’s a way of avoiding having to notice the countless other shapes and styles of life with whom our lives are entangled! It does seem to me that that is what’s happening – a reflexive crouch, a way of avoiding what most terrifies us. That’s not all that it is, of course, but I think that’s part of the dynamic – when something is calling us to actually open our gaze beyond the purely human sphere, it feels disturbingly taboo and terrifying, really, since it’s so contrary to the many gestures inculcated by several hundred years of modernity.

MILSTEIN: You and I talked some time ago about ‘the Anthropocene’ and you had thoughts about the term, as well as concerns. You had started to play around with another conceptual term – in addition to the many others that have been thought up and put into circulation. Can we talk a bit about your term and how it might connect with conversations about ecocultural identity?

ABRAM: Well, listen – I have no quarrel with what the Anthropocene purports to be naming. That is, the simple truth that has been evident to any half-awake human being for several generations: that our species has become a geological force – especially so in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, by virtue of our numbers and our technology – that in recent times we’ve become an earthly power comparable to the largest geologic forces, like hurricanes, earthquakes, and volcanic eruptions. And this should be recognized and acknowledged – that most humans, by the way we live, are now massively affecting the life of the biosphere, even the habitability of this planet, not just for centuries but for millennia to come. This should be obvious to all. But my quarrel is with the particular name that’s been given to this epoch we’ve recently entered, to this somewhat new planetary state of affairs.

            Allow me to back up a moment. We are a social species, us two-leggeds; so we, in our particular form of sociality, we seem to secrete this thing that we call verbal language, among us. And it’s a beautiful thing, language. But those of us who speak, who use words (which is pretty much all of us) – and especially those of us who take up the craft of writing – it’s our responsibility, it seems to me, to always be tending the language to keep it from desiccating, keeping our language alive and brim full with meaning. Like many poets, when I write an essay or a book, I write with a sense of responsibility to the language itself – with the intention to keep meaning fresh and alive, and to enliven, by whatever increments, the ways we speak in our most ordinary conversations. So, when I first started publishing my own work, I found myself grappling with what Eileen Crist calls the poverty of our nomenclature, the sad lack of rich and nuanced words to speak of what we call ‘nature,’ or to speak of the relation between nature and culture. Nature is so often thought of as ‘the other’ of culture, so ‘nature’ is out there, ‘culture’ is in here. Culture and civilization are what exist inside the city walls, as it were, and nature is everything that’s outside the window, outside the door, outside the city. And so then we have more recent terms like ‘the environment.’ But the term ‘environment’ carries so many unfortunate assumptions with it. It flattens all of the outrageous diversity of our world – humpback whales and spiders spinning their webs, and octopi and earthworms and elephants – glomming them all together in this single word, ‘the environment,’ which tacitly situates humankind at the center of this wild-flowering profusion of shapes and sensibilities. The term ‘environment’ locates us humans at the center, as the only thing that’s not ‘environment,’ since all these other beings are ‘our’ environment. They are what surrounds us.

            Yearning for some other ways to speak of this, I soon realized that I really wanted some way to speak of nature in a fresh manner, in a way that implies that the world of human culture, with all of its creativity – of language, of art, of technology – is encompassed by and permeated by and hence a part of the wider natural world. Human culture is sustained and perfused by this wider world, which nonetheless exceeds us, exceeds our capacity to comprehend it, exceeds even the fluid bounds of our imagination. I was yearning for a way of articulating human culture as a subset within the larger set of earthly nature. But this would need a different phrase, a different way of framing things: we had no word or figure of speech by which to speak of culture as a nested set, wholly embedded within the natural world.

            And so I coined a phrase, the more-than-human world, to indicate that the human world is a subset within the larger set of the more-than-human world – a world that encompasses, subtends, and even pervades the human world but that also always exceeds the human world; it is always more than just us and our linguistic creations and our artifacts. So that was a very important term for me – and, over a number of years, I watched as the phrase was taken up by many others within the wider ecological movement, and became part of the lingua franca of the many-faceted movement for ecological sanity. I think that is something we should all be engaged in – finding new terms and new phrases to articulate states of affairs that were previously unnoticed because previously unspoken, like your word ‘ecocultural identity.’

            So then, here comes this new phrase floated by some scientists, this new word – the Anthropocene – which has got many people very excited, and seems to have precipitated a kind of sustained academic orgasm among many scholars and theorists, especially in the humanities, largely because it breaks down the facile distinction that seems to exist between culture and nature. The ‘Anthropocene,’ as a term, seems to say that human culture now so thoroughly influences the rest of nature that we must begin to speak of the biosphere as now living within the regime of the anthropos. That is to say, human activities have so thoroughly influenced every facet of the organic, biotic world that that world itself can be characterized as an Anthropocene Earth.

            The problem with this is that if we accept this notion of the Anthropocene, then there is nothing that exceeds the anthropos. It’s in direct contrast and contradiction to what for me has been so important – to accept that there are so many facets of the Earth that exceed humankind, that exceed even our reach of our human intellect and imagination. But the Anthropocene suggests that the anthropos – the human – is coextensive with earthly reality itself. There is no more-than-human world, for there is nothing that exceeds the anthropos.

            The huge problem brought by the discourse of the Anthropocene – that the human is now co-extensive with earthly reality, such that there is no outside, there is nothing that exceeds the anthropos – is that such discourse forecloses any move toward humility. It interrupts or really undermines any gesture of humility in the face of a more-than-human Earth. Whereas it does seem to me that our most proper and necessary response for us, today, as humans, is that we slowly drink a tall glass of humility, swallowing it down and allowing it to enter our bloodstream. Recognizing the extremity and the extent of the damage we have wrought and are wreaking upon the rest of this biosphere, it seems to me that we must begin to recognize the beauty, the wonder, the multiplicitous elegance of our world in its outrageous otherness, and step back from having such a immense footprint everywhere we tread.

            But of course the very term ‘Anthropocene’ precludes such a turn toward restraint. It rather names ourselves, the anthropos, as those who must now take the reins of this world. It’s up to us to manage the Earth, now, managing it, even engineering it to best suit our purposes (or perhaps for the benefit of all beings, if we can do so) – we’re the ones who have to steer this boat now. It’s like the old storekeeper’s admonition, ‘You broke it; you own it.’ So we must now consider ourselves the masters and controllers of the biosphere. It seems to me that that is what’s implied – or at least that that’s the implication that most persons will necessarily draw from this name, the Anthropocene.

            Indeed, there are already many persons who are taking the phrase in this manner – as an aspirational term, a phrase that celebrates our human ascendance over every part of nature – even if that was not the original intent of those who coined the term. But natural scientists, including Eugene Stoermer and Paul Crutzen (the biologist and atmospheric chemist who coined the term) are not always especially attentive to the poetics of their craft. They are not always attentive to metaphoric resonances; they are not as attentive as others might be to all of the consequences latent in a particular term they might choose. So I think we, all of us, as citizens – as scientists and as non-scientists, as poets and as philosophers – have to always be trying to do that work, pondering the epistemological and ethical consequences of the terms that we use and taking care to avoid terminology that’s inherently problematic, or dangerous, or destructive.

            Many people have come up with alternative names for the Anthropocene – the Capitalocene, for instance, by those who want to say, ‘Look, it’s not humans per se, it’s just humans beholden to the imperatives of the capitalist economy that have created this mess.’ And many, many other alternatives have been put forward. But our scientist sisters and brothers, our geologists and planetary biologists and Earth system scientists, have been saying, ‘Yeah, yeah, but look, there’s a basic reality that we need to face, which is the centrality of our species in its entirety in this planet-wide transformation that is underway, and that’s why anthropos needs to be emphasized.’ To which I reply: Look, if we want to name our species as central to this new epoch – if it’s really the activity of humankind, as a whole, that is bringing about this new planetary regime – then listen, comrades: Instead of the term ‘anthropos’ and the implicit arrogance of the term ‘Anthropocene,’ why not work with this other ancient word for our species – the ‘human’ – in its rich and earthly etymology. After all, the word ‘human’ is closely cognate with the word ‘humility,’ since both are derived from ‘humus,’ which names the Earth underfoot, the soil.

            As soon as we notice the humble, earthly ancestry of the word ‘human’ then another possible name for this new geological epoch immediately suggests itself. If we really wish to underscore the human species as a key – if unwitting – perpetrator of this new and rather calamitous state of affairs, wherein so many other animal and plant species are tumbling into the oblivion of extinction, then why not call this epoch the Humilocene. The Humilocene: the epoch of humility. That does emphasize our species’ outsize influence right there in the name – Humilocene – yet it also feels awkward and disturbing, at first, for it carries an echo of another word that shares the same origin, which is ‘humiliation.’

            Yet these echoes – humble, humility, even humiliation – are a mark of what is right with the term. Shouldn’t humankind, after all, be humiliated by the evidence of what we have wrought? Shouldn’t we be humbled by the slowly dawning recognition of how much loss, how much destruction so many of our species have brought about? It seems to me that Humilocene would be a far more appropriate term than Anthropocene – precisely because it suggests, and even enjoins, a step toward restraint and a new humility for our kind. Perhaps, in oral tradition, this transitional period – the dawn of the Humilocene – may come to be known as ‘The Humbling.’ (It’s a term suggested by my friend, Dougald Hine, one of the founders of the Dark Mountain Project.)

MILSTEIN: This evocative term, the Humilocene, in part brings to mind much of the writing you have done about becoming sensitive and sensible, and the vulnerability and reciprocity inherent in doing so. How do these processes of becoming connect to potential for transforming ecocultural identities in these times?

ABRAM: You are talking about the process of coming to deeply value our sensory experience, according a sort of primary value to the world we experience with our animal senses. Some speak of my philosophical craft as geophilosophy. That is to say, trying to work out how do we philosophize, how do we think, under the influence of a more-than-human Earth. As a cultural ecologist my particular fascination is with the ecology of sensory experience: the way that the activity of our animal senses – of our eyes, of our ears, and our skin, of our nostrils and our taste buds – the way the activity of our senses binds our separate nervous systems into the enveloping ecosystem. It seems to me that perception, or sensorial experience, functions always like a sort of glue binding our individual nervous systems into the enveloping ecosystem.

            But I’m also deeply interested in the ecology of language: the manner in which our words, or what we say, so profoundly influences what we see (or hear or taste) of the Earth around us. I’m convinced there are ways of speaking that actually inhibit or frustrate the spontaneous reciprocity between our sensing body and the earthly sensuous. But I’m just as convinced that there exist other ways of speaking that can open and encourage that spontaneous affinity between our animal senses and the animate Earth. So that’s the edge where I’m always paying attention. It seems to me that sensory perception, that our senses when left to themselves – unimpeded by technologies that intervene between our senses and the earthly sensuous – our senses instinctively bind themselves into the more-thanhuman terrain. I mean, after all, our eyes and our ears and our skin have co-evolved with all of these other textures, all of these other colors and shapes and sounds, so that our ears, by their very structure, are tuned to the honking of geese, and the howling of wolves. Our eyes have co-evolved with many other eyes, and are always, in a sense, waiting to be seen by eyes that are not just human.

            But we’re living at a time when so many technologies are inserting themselves between our bodily senses and the broad body of the Earth around us, short circuiting this instinctive reciprocity, so now we’re caught in this kind of reflection with our own signs – this reflective loop between ourselves and the screen that short-circuits that older co-evolved reciprocity with the animate terrain. Today, we’re engaged with so many technologies that only reflect us back to ourselves that we’ve stopped noticing how richly tuned our animal body is for meeting – being met by – the many-voiced Earth.

MILSTEIN: If we re-attune, is that an entry point to more ecocentric ecocultural identities? For me, too, the technological fixation, screen life, two-dimensionality, just as you said, has started to bound who we are more and more thickly.

ABRAM: Agreed. If we are looking to really transform our culture, to shape-shift this astonishingly oblivious society that has become so blind and deaf to the presence of other forms of earthly life, I think perhaps the most interesting, as well as subversive and powerful, move we can make is to identify ever more deeply with our own bodily presence, to open a new solidarity with our animal flesh. No, not just solidarity – to actually identify with this breathing, pulsing creature that we call our body.

            Instead, we so often think of the body as something other than ourselves. The linguistic habits of our Western civilization have taught one to think of oneself as an ineffable essence – a kind of spirit presence that is housed within this animal flesh. We think that our bodies are one thing, and our selves are something else. But to identify with the body itself, to intuit that this palpable shape – this porous skin, and the blood surging in all these boulevards and byways just beneath that skin, and these nostrils sniffing the air at every moment, and these ears grazing among the sounds of the world – that this is me. That this body is the self, the tangible presence of the self. That the spirit is not housed in the body but that it has this palpable, thingly aspect. The more I identify with this body, the more I discover my entanglement in a more-than-human world. For the body is our sole access to the other animals. This body is what enables my affinity with all these other bodies – bodies not just of other animals, of coyote, and squirrel, and spider, and raven, but also the physical body of trees, and the plants whom we ingest as food, all these rooted but sensitive beings. I have access to these other bodily presences only by virtue of being a body myself. To identify ever more deeply with my creaturely flesh is a very subversive move indeed, affirming my embedment in a more-than-human community. It is a most powerful way of coming to our senses, beginning to taste the world with one’s tongue, to hear and attune to the speech of other beings.

            I think it bears saying that an objection to this approach could come from a range of stalwart folks grappling with various forms of disability, persons who find themselves embodied in ways that are incredibly limiting and frustrating, or that deeply impede their way in the world. Sometimes such persons approach me, to say: ‘But, Abram, I’m sorry, I am not going to identify with this body. What I am is something so much more creative, and so much more free than the lunky animal of my body.’ We can think of the physicist who just left us, Stephen Hawking.

            Yet I can’t help but suspect that it’s just the habits in our language that lead us into that sort of a conundrum. That is, no matter how limited my body is relative to others, it is still my sole access to every facet of the real. Even if I am bound to a wheelchair, I’m still breathing. I’m still tasting. Or, even if I have no taste, my access to the colors and shapes of things. Even if I’m blind and deaf, it’s still this body with its limited senses that opens the possibility of reflection and imagination. All my flights of creativity are possible because of this body’s intimate exchange with other bodies and beings.

            Even a fully able-bodied human is very limited. There are so many things I cannot do. I can’t flap my arms and take to the sky. I’m unable to grow apples out of my limbs like that apple tree outside the window. To be a body has always been a source of frustration for the over-civilized, over-educated mind of many modern folk. And hence, within the Western tradition there’s long been an aspiration to divest ourselves of the body, to break free of our embodiment. This flight from embodiment – because the body terrifies us; being a body renders us mortal and ensures that we’re going to die. It also renders us vulnerable, in every moment, to the gaze of others who might see me as being too fat, or too skinny, too dark-skinned, or not feminine enough, or too pimpled. My body is vulnerable to the attack of various pathogens who might take me down, or make me shiver with a bone-wrenching fever. (I’ve had malaria a couple times.) And so this body is continually associated with being a drag on our spirit, and a block on our aspirations. It holds us to the Earth and makes us succumb to the suck of gravity.

            But truly this is a bizarre and blinkered perspective, since, after all, there would be no sense of wonder, no possibility, no aspiration to flight if one wasn’t an enfleshed thing that encounters other fleshly beings with wings, swooping and flapping. There would be no possibility for thought, no experience whatsoever, without a sensuous and sensate body to sense things and to reflect on those things.

CASTRO-SOTOMAYOR: When you’re talking about the body, I was thinking about what kind of spaces you are picturing that body as immersed in. I’m thinking, for instance, of heavily urban spaces where ‘nature’ has become not something with which we connect, but instead only part of the beautification of the city. It’s something that’s just there or something we don’t pay attention to. With your evocative language you bring me out of those really urban spaces and put me in spaces where the possibility to reconnect to the more-thanhuman world is easier to imagine. But what about those bodies that dwell in heavily urban spaces and who might not have the possibility of developing those connections – spaces where the body’s interactions are more limited due to the characteristics of the place?

ABRAM: I’m envisioning the body wherever the body finds itself. Like right here in this room. Sometimes, after I give a lecture, people come up and say, ‘Yeah, that’s cool what you say about earthlynature, but I have no experience of that nature you speak of. ‘Cause I live here in the middle of the city, and my apartment is up on the eighteenth floor, and so my whole encounter with nature is with a single plant just outside the front door of my apartment building. I pass this plant on my way into the taxi, or on my way home from work in another high rise building, and so I don’t really have any experience of the more-than-human you speak of.’

            But that’s a mighty weird thing to say. Wherever we are, even in the downtown of some metropolis, we are not just in contact with nature, we’re subsumed within nature, and immersed in it all the time! Even in the middle of the city we are breathing, thank goodness – yet there’d be no oxygen for us to inhale if there weren’t all these green and rooted folks around the city and poking up through the cracks in the sidewalks, plants who are exhaling this oxygenated air that all us animals need for our metabolism. And after breathing it in, we alchemize that oxygenated air within our organism, transforming it, so that what we animals then breathe out is precisely what all the plants breathe in – since that carbon dioxide-infused air is exactly what the plants need for their photosynthetic metabolism. So by the simple act of breathing, we are exchanging air not just with other animals (and the other human animals who surround us there in the city), but we are all inter-breathing with the grasses, and wildflowers and the maple and beech trees growing within and around the city.

            Further, even in the downtowns, we remain under the influence of gravity – that is, still susceptible to the intense attraction our bodies have for the body of the Earth, or that the Earth has for our bodies and that holds us to her. Ground and gravity are not human inventions! Indeed gravity is an astonishment: the mutual attraction between my body and the body of the Earth. There are so many ways in which we are in contact with something more than just ourselves, even in the middle of the city. And, of course, there are swallows and other wingeds swooping in and out of the streets between the buildings, and nesting under our windows.

            Nonetheless, we’ve come to think that there’s hardly any ‘nature’ in the city. It’s a habit that’s now encoded in the ways we speak: nature is always somewhere out there, and culture, and all of this so-called human stuff, is in here. Nature and culture are on different sides of this divide. So I’m carefully trying to undo that, coaxing folks to notice that the city is not just permeated by nature, it is permeated by wildness. In fact, any sufficiently dense urban hubbub – like New York City – is deeply wild, and you get various humans sort of embodying wild creatures just as intense and unique in their otherness as bear, or jaguar, or harpy eagle.

            A couple decades ago, the Santa Fe Institute was pioneering this notion of ‘complexity’ and pointing out that even if we know the location of every molecule of air at this moment, we could not possibly predict the arrangement those molecules would take in a moment due to the nonlinear behavior of the air currents, and they would say this is true even of a water drop as it’s falling down a window pane when it’s raining outside – it’s impossible to predict the precise trajectory that that water drop will take down that flat pane of glass. The scientific community came up with a word for such inherently unpredictable behavior going on all around us, even in the middle of the city, even up on the eighteenth floor of some skyscraper. They would say the air currents in the room are chaotic. ‘Chaotic’ was the term they chose to speak of such non-linear behavior. Even the heart pounding in my chest, whose beat seems fairly regular, defies our ability to predict the precise micro moment of the next heartbeat – because it’s always just a bit out of phase with itself, which allows it to respond well to any sudden perturbation, to any surprise or shock. And they called that pattern of the heartbeat, or the falling raindrop, or the air currents, ‘chaotic.’ Which seemed to me a fairly ill-chosen term, because by ‘chaos’ we usually mean ‘no order whatsoever.’ But, of course, the heartbeat is not utterly unruly. The pattern of waves as they crash on a beach, or of air currents in the room, are not without any order whatsoever. So, to call them chaotic seemed very strange to me. I think that the word they were looking for was ‘wild.’ These unpredictable patterns are not entirely out of control, they are just out of our control, beyond our ability to fully fathom and predict. They’re wild. And that’s true everywhere – within the city as well as out in the woods. Wildness is what we’re made of. The heart beating in my chest is wild, and is much more-than-human in its vitality.

MILSTEIN: These intimate understandings of the wildness of ourselves and others, and this clarity about always, everywhere, being in contact with the more-than-human world, seem to connect with thinking you have done about traditionally oral cultures and the understanding that all things have the power of speech. Could you talk a bit about your interest in orality and how orality might relate to ecocultural identity?

ABRAM: Well, when we speak of traditionally oral cultures we are speaking about cultures that have evolved and flourished, often for many millennia, in the absence of any formal system of writing that is coupled to the spoken language. Without a formal system of writing, verbal language is felt to be something very different from what it becomes for a highly literate culture. Once you write words down, you can begin to think of those words as labels, for instance. If I encounter an oak tree, the encounter sometimes calls the word ‘oak’ out of my mouth. But if I write down the word ‘oak,’ then, if I encounter an actual oak tree, I can now view or at least imagine that visible word alongside that visible tree. Similarly with the word ‘rain.’ Now that visible word represents this other visible, wet thing, the rain itself. Once ‘mountain’ is written down, it becomes a label that represents – or even stands for – that big thing over there, that vaguely triangular thing. So, with writing we can begin to think of words as representing the world, and we come to think of language, verbal language, as something that stands for, or represents, the real. But for deeply oral cultures, that have not stepped into the regime of writing, verbal language is not really a representation of the world – rather it’s a piece of the world. It’s made of the world. Words, terms, phrases, are things, like stones. A spoken word has a texture and a taste in your mouth and as you roll it over your tongue. And so other beings are affected by the rhythms of our speaking and the music of our discourse.

            For traditionally oral cultures, language or verbal language is felt not so much as a way of representing the tree or the mountain but rather a way of bridging the distance or the gap between me and that mountain. That is, I use language to connect me to the other beings. There’s a sense of words or phrases as arising in a kind of call and response with a speaking world. For example, it’s not by chance that words in English that we use to describe the movement of a stream flowing between the banks will be words like ‘rush,’ ‘gush,’ ‘wash,’ or ‘splash.’ Because the sound that unites all those words – ‘sshhhhh’ – is the sound that the water itself speaks as it moves between the banks. So it’s not that we make up words for things out of whole cloth, but rather that our spoken language is taught to us by the speech of the things themselves, that human language is informed by the speech of an animate world.

            Within traditionally oral cultures, a person often will use the spoken language to call herself into the presence of a mountain, for instance, or to call that mountain into relation with her. A person can sing the sun up out of the ground in the morning, and indeed many traditional Indigenous peoples feel that if there are not at least some of them out there before dawn praying the sun up out of the ground, then in fact the sun may choose not to rise.

            Westerners think of prayer as an arcane or highly religious act – the act of speaking to a divine presence outside the world. But, at its source, prayer is simply speaking to the world rather than speaking always about the world. Speaking to the world: speaking to the moon, speaking to the sun, speaking to the wind, and listening for the wind’s reply. So to assume (as so many of our Indigenous oral ancestors did) that everything is alive and that everything speaks is hardly a superstitious and irrational assumption. It simply is a very practical way to hold one’s senses open to the calls, the cries, the solicitations of the other beings around us and the land itself. It’s a powerful and pragmatic way of tuning oneself to the nuances in the land, to what the river itself is asking of me today, or to what is unfurling just now, here, at this bend in the dry riverbed.

            What better way to attune my senses to what’s happening, right here, then to address the riverbed: ‘It’s good to see you again this morning!’ And so oral cultures spend a lot of time, praising the things around them, aloud, offering praise to the trees, offering praise to the clouds, to the coyote or elk whose tracks you come upon, just as a way of binding your attention into the more-than-human plane of life, the dance of things. And there’s this intuition that the other animals hear and feel and can register something of your appreciation, and also the plants – who are not, after all, insentient beings. There’s even a sense that the land itself honors and registers and feels our pleasure and our appreciation of it, and so it leans close to us when we are praising it, and takes more care of us.

            I think these are just very practical practices. They don’t make sense in a literal, literate mindset – but literal truth is itself an artifact of literacy, and hence a very recent way of understanding the world. The sense of the world as a literal set of facts rides on the surface of a much deeper, much older oral animistic sensibility that knows that everything is alive, awake, and aware. Which is simply a way of asserting that we can have a dynamic relation not just with other people, but with every facet of the sensuous terrain. That I can resonate or feel into any and every aspect of the world. That the ground itself feels my steps as I walk upon it. And I don’t think we can ever eradicate this old, instinctive sensibility within ourselves. It’s just covered over by a little veneer of literate civilization.

            Mind you, I don’t mean to be dissing literacy or disparaging literature. I am a writer; I love books and I love to read. I’m just aware that literacy brings a kind of hyper-reflective sensibility into existence, a sensibility that is able to detach itself from the sensuous terrain much more easily than any non-literate, oral-cultured person can detach him or herself from land. And so there’s a huge responsibility, in this era of ecological breakdown, for those of us who are writers – a responsibility to find ways to open the literate mind back onto the animate Earth, a responsibility to bring the literate intellect back in service to our full-bodied oral affinity with the many-voiced Earth. To bring our human intelligence back into the wider conversation. And I’m excited that some writers are beginning to do this. My friend Richard Powers recently published an astonishing novel in this regard, a book titled The Overstory, wherein the primary protagonists are, well… trees.

MILSTEIN: I like the way you talk about this very thin kind of crust of literate civilization, and you’re not talking in terms of past and future – it’s not this temporal progression from one to the other. You write about that, as well – the undoing of this teleological fallacy of sociocultural progress, of value-weighted development from one state of being to another.

ABRAM: Right, it’s all present, in a way, like sedimented layers of Earth (and our body also has these sedimented layers within itself), and underneath many of these, there are these deeper strata. I mean, for 98 or 99 percent of our human tenure on this planet, we all lived as hunters and gatherers, as fishers and foragers, in a manifestly animistic context. We lived in small-scale communities that assumed everything was alive, awake, and aware. And it’s just a tiny shred of that time since humans have stepped into the regime of settlement and agriculture, the regime of literacy. It’s important to realize that we’re all still composed of a deeply oral sensibility – that the languages we speak, almost all of them, arose in a thoroughly animistic context. And, hence, that our languages were not born just of humans speaking to one another, but were born in a kind of call and response with a speaking, many-voiced world.

CASTRO-SOTOMAYOR: How do these ideas connect to notions regarding the place-based constitution of language? In Spell of the Sensuous you define place as ‘a qualitative matrix, a pulsing and potentized field of experience, able to move us even in its stillness’ (Abram, 1996, p. 190). I found this really fascinating. How do you see place and space interrelating in an era that privileges the global over the local or, as you’ve said, the homogeneous and void space over the qualitative dimensions of place? And how do these relations of place and space influence our identities?

ABRAM: Well, ‘space’ and ‘time’ in our Western and Westernized cultures have become conceptual abstractions that have very little to do with our direct corporeal experience of our world. We tend to think of time as strictly linear – as a etime that progressively moves in a line from a distant past to a very different future. Meanwhile, we think of space as an immense and infinite homogeneous expanse, a void. And we speak of these as if they’re two different things. But the idea that one could even imagine a space without time, a space with no time in it whatsoever, is really quite silly. Space needs time in order to spread, in order for any point in that space to reach or make contact with any other point. That is, space needs time in order to be space. And to imagine time unfolding without any space in which changes happen is similarly nonsensical. It seems to me that linear time and homogeneous empty space are twin abstractions that function to eclipse the Earth from our awareness. They are a way of hiding ourselves from our actual, bodily inherence in the breathing Earth.

            But if we allow our linear notion of time to flow back into homogeneous space, then space itself transforms – each point in space begins to display its own dynamism and pulse, and by virtue of dynamism begins to differentiate itself. As soon as we allow time to blend with space, space transforms into place. Place is a dimension filled with specificity and uniqueness, wherein each point in the terrain is richly different from any other point. Why? Because of the way things happen there! Because of the rhythm, the complex dynamism of each place. The rhythm of life here in the upper Rio Grande valley is so different from the rhythm of life in Amazonia. And both are wildly different from the rhythm and pulse of the way things unfold in the Hudson River estuary. Or from the dynamism and syncopation of life in the Pacific Northwest of this continent.

            Certainly, the renewal and replenishment of a deep sense of place is a necessary ingredient in finding our way to a livable future. The diverse Indigenous cultures of the Earth all are or were, by and large, place-based cultures – cultures profoundly informed by the unique characteristics of the terrains they inhabit. Even deeply nomadic cultures were still cultures of place, often exquisitely attuned to the broad bioregions within which they circulated, following the animals and the fruiting times of the local plants. Yet many of us, today, carry a recognition that some of our Indigenous forebears may not have had. For it’s clear today that each place, each ecosystem, is dependent for its well-being upon the health and flourishing of every other ecosystem, each place dependent upon the well-being of other, very different places, most of them far away.

            Indeed, in our own era, we’ve become aware that the Earth itself is a place – a vast Place that contains all these smaller places. The Earth is not everything; it’s not the universe. It’s just our own finite spherical world. Yet, as many Indigenous cultures do, I’ve begun to think of the Earth as my larger body – of this two-armed and two-legged form as my smaller body, and the Earth as my larger Flesh. It’s also your larger Flesh. It’s the larger Body of each of us, but it’s also the larger Body of the spider, and the larger Body of that aspen tree. We have our individual small bodies, but we all share a common spherical metabolism in which our individual physiologies are completely entwined.

            Of course the Earth is an utterly immense relative to our small bodies, and so we never experience all of the Earth at once. I only experience some small corner of it at any time. Whatever place or bioregion where I dwell, or linger, at this moment is the way Earth discloses itself to me. And we may suspect that each place, each ecosystem, is a unique organ within the planetary physiology. The U.S. Southwest desert, here where we are speaking, is one of the organs of this larger body, just as the Amazon basin is clearly a very key organ – the rainforest there often now thought of as the lungs of this larger Body. But every place is an organ within the broad spherical metabolism that is our planet.

            Now, if the cells in my left kneecap were trying to act the same as the cells in my right lung, my body would break down. I wouldn’t last very long. Well, just so, if here in the upper Rio Grande watershed we try to live the same way of life that folks are carrying on in the Hudson River estuary, I would imagine that our larger Body would begin to break down. If folks in the Amazon Basin are trying to live out forms of culture identical to those that pulse along the lower Yangtse River, in China, the larger physiology of the Earth will ultimately collapse, will break down. Each place – each ecosystem or bioregion – calls for, is open to, a range of possible cultures, but whatever culture shapes itself there, it must be appropriate to the mix of plants that live and flourish in the soils of that place, and to the specific animals that pollinate those plants, or graze on them, the particular creatures who dwell within or migrate through that place. And hence those possibilities for human – and more-than-human – culture will be very different from the possibilities afforded by the islands of the United Kingdom, themselves very different from the styles of culture that are possible in the Mediterranean, or that are called for by the ecology of this high desert region where we now sit.

            Hence, in the face of the spreading homogenization of culture – a Starbucks on every street corner, with two or three McDonald’s on the periphery of every town – it would seem like a great rediversification of culture is very important in this time. Letting our communities take their directives – the rhythms and textures – from the needs of the more-than-human community wherever we dwell. Differences among communities, and among cultures, become increasingly important. Now, perhaps for the first time, we can say that in order for our culture to flourish, here in the high desert – in order for our particular spirits of place, the gods and goddesses that we honor, these mountains with their icy snowcaps that we and the other animals all depend on, melting slowly through the spring and summer, replenishing the aquifers and the forests, and these spectacular lightning storms that are intensifying at this time of year – in order for these powers or gods to flourish, we need your gods to be flourishing down there in the Amazon, and they'd better be different from our gods and goddesses! Because that ecology there is so richly different from ours here!

            That is very different from anything I think the Earth has seen before from us humans – that we start taking pleasure in the differences in our cultures, realizing that the beauty of any particular culture depends upon the flourishing of other cultures that are really different, of other belief systems that are really different. And such is possible, perhaps for the first time, because we all share a common awareness of the larger Flesh that they’re a part of, of the larger physiology or spherical Body that we’re all a part of. And here we call it Terra, while over there you call it Gaia, but we know that these are all different translations of the same big Mystery that no person and no culture can ever experience all at once in its entirety.

MILSTEIN: I’m momentarily going to shift the scope from the global to a more one-on-one interspecies scale of identification. In Becoming Animal (2011), you tell a story about being in your kayak in the Salish Sea in the U.S. Pacific Northwest. And you talk about the stellar sea lions, and being drawn to them, and what happens when the sea lions let you know you clearly have come too close, and then, at that same time, that humpback whale comes up right next to your kayak and breaches, multiple times! And you write that the encounter – and other charged interspecies encounters – changed you, that you began to notice the animal dimension in your own speaking. I wonder if you could expand on this in terms of how you view such interspecies moments connecting us to animal dimensions of our identities.

ABRAM: A few things that brings up. One is, speaking very personally, I’m acutely aware that those electric encounters with other shapes of sensitivity and sentience have been formative for me, whenever they have happened, starting when I was quite young. But certain encounters – like when I was cross-country skiing in the northern Rockies and came out of a clutch of trees and unexpectedly found myself face to face with a mother moose, about six feet away from me, and her eyes locked on mine as she pounded the snow with her forelegs. And then I saw one ear of hers swivel backward, and you see a little moose behind her, and it was a mighty dangerous encounter. And I don’t know how my body came up with this, but I just took a deep breath and I went, ‘aaaaaaaaaah’ – louder than that though. And, by the time it died out, I noticed the muscles in those forelegs relaxing. So I took another gulp of air and offered another tone ‘aaaaaaaaaah.’ And, by the time that second tone died out, the moose had gone back to nibbling on the willows, completely relaxed.

            And I thought, ‘Wow! That’s really cool!,’ as I was gliding past. Because I realized then that there’s so much information carried in our sounds, for those who have ears to hear. Yet that was just one in a slew of such encounters. That experience of locking eyes with another has happened to me various times. Quite early on, after it had happened maybe the third time with another animal in the backcountry, I began to notice a sensation that always seems the case now: if my eyes lock with another creature, there’s a sensation of something passing out of my right eye into its left eye, and out of its right eye and into my left eye. So a kind of circuit is set up, flowing between us both, and then something breaks the trance, or one of us takes a step and it breaks. And I don’t know for how long I’ve been in that trance, only that everything is changed. It’s as if another very different nervous system has just, you know, synapsed itself to my nervous system, and something of me has flowed into it, and something of it has flowed into me.

            At a certain moment, I began to realize that every such encounter has changed me, profoundly. And I actually can chart my life, and the different moves and changes in my life that I’ve made, by these encounters with other animals. These experiences are rare, but there’s a sense for me that I’m most real and most really myself when I fall into relationship with a radically other form of life, when I feel myself gazing and being gazed at in return from an entirely different set of senses. And it returns me to myself in a new manner. I am speaking very personally here because it feels like my life emerges from such encounters. I feel I am more present at such moments of deep meeting.

            So, then I think of Wolfgang Goethe, who says that every object, rightly contemplated, opens an organ within us for its contemplation. This beautiful, simple attention that Goethe gave to the act of perception, to sensory experience itself. When I come into the presence of another being, of another nervous system, of another animal, of another life that is just as present – or perhaps far more so – than me in my life, when I come into the presence of another shape of awareness, the moment extends itself, and it’s not just a split second encounter, but an open moment. And time seems to dissolve, and there is – I can’t help but feel – a new depth within myself constituted by the encounter with the other.

            Within the Eastern traditions, and Buddhism in particular, there’s a teaching that is usually translated as the codependence of self and other, or the interdependent arising of self and other – that the self emerges only in relation to the other, and that we know ourselves really only as we come into relation with others. How much more deeply and profoundly this is the case when the other we encounter, and make contact with, is of another species! So it seems to me.           Thich Nhat Hanh, the great Vietnamese Zen master, coined a word that is so indispensable for us today: interbeing. Our interbeing with one another, our interbeing with a sea lion, our interbeing with a moose, or a coyote, or even a spider that we unexpectedly come upon as she’s spinning her web. And if I gradually tune my eyes to the spider as she spirals, setting the silken threads of the web, then this whole other depth of the world opens around me, the world as experienced from this other scale of experience! The interdependent co-arising of self and other – that who I am is, in ever so many ways, a function of the others I’m in relation to, who give me back to myself, transformed and deepened.

            So, to Thich Nhat Hanh’s word, interbeing. I would want also to add another similar term: interbreathing. That, as Thich Nhat Hanh says, we inter-are with one another. But also, in a very palpable, bodily way, we are all of us interbreathing with one another – continuously exchanging breath. As we were saying before, what all us animals breathe out is precisely what all the green and growing plants are breathing in, and what these grasses and trees breathe out is what all us animals need for our own metabolism. So what we breathe out, they breathe in; what they breathe out, we breathe in. Talk about reciprocity!

            It’s so exquisitely palpable, and luscious really. And yet we, in this modern moment, tend to take the air profoundly for granted – as though it were just empty space. And so we don’t notice this magic: that the atmosphere of this Earth is an elixir born of the interbreathing of our organism with all these other earthly organisms – with the soils, with the oceans, with the fish in those seas. So, in this very visceral, material sense, we are born of one another, materially constituted by our relations with one another. (The term ‘interbreathing’ is also used by the great contemporary Jewish bodhisattva and activist-sage Rabbi Arthur Waskow.)

MILSTEIN: I’d love to connect this further to your experience with shapeshifting and identity. You write about this in Becoming Animal, and especially you yourself experiencing shifting shape into another being, a raven. I told my sons about that this morning as they were eating their breakfast, and they stopped, their spoons just froze in the air, as I told them the story. This possibility of shifting into a very different being’s shape and experiencing an embodied alternate reality speaks to so many of us, yet few believe we really can do such a thing. I don’t know if you actually knew you were training to do such a thing.

ABRAM: I didn’t. No.

MILSTEIN: I’d love to hear your insights on how shifting into a different being, just momentarily, might affect dimensions of ecocultural identity – one’s own – and whether you see this aspect of expanding notions of self as central to the Indigenous magicians, or shamans, you’ve studied with.

ABRAM: Well, I try not to use the word shaman, only because it’s become way overused. I’m living in a town where every lamppost seems to think it’s a shaman. It’s just a term that comes from one very particular part of the world – Siberia. And when we speak of this thing, ‘shamanism,’ as though it’s the same practice among the Pueblo peoples or with peoples in Amazonia or in Indonesia, we really miss that the shaman, or magician, is someone who is not primarily in service to the human community, but is really in service to the whole more-than-human community, and to the human collective as a part of that wider community. And that community is very different in Indonesia than it is in Siberia, since the creatures in the Indonesian islands are so varied and different from those in the terrain of the reindeer herders in the circumpolar Arctic, and since the animals and the plants there are so different from those here in the upper Rio Grande valley. So the practice of such magic intermediary work is necessarily very, very different because it’s informed by the very different shapes of sentience that inhabit and even constitute these different ecologies.

            And not just the animals and the plants, but the landforms, the elements, the winds and the waters of each place. The magician or intermediary has an ecocultural identity composed of the place and all the beings that make up that terrain, that ecology. He or she will often, if not always, have certain other animals, and perhaps a few plants as well, who are her particular familiars. A close affinity with raven and with coyote, each of whom then provides for her a whole other set of senses. Because by apprenticing myself to raven, which is to say by watching and following these birds as they swoop and dive, learning their antics and where they hang out, and listening in on their conversations with one another, their cantankerous calls and cries, and then their more intimate <makes soft raven vocalizations> as they’re speaking with one another, I’m letting their colors, their textures, their ways in the world inform and move into me. Slowly, this other animal, and its ways, begins to be felt as a variant of my own experience of the world.

            My attention to its ways provides another take on the same world that I experience, but from a very different angle, from a very different perspective, through a very different set of senses. So I gain a kind of stereoscopic experience of the local Earth. Just as I do if I am given to stopping in astonishment and watching spiders as they weave their webs. If I really lend it my attention, watching and learning whatever I can of spider – which also can include reading and studying what’s been discovered about the ways of these local spiders by scientists and naturalists, but not only that. If I’m regularly out in the land, encountering other beings or following their tracks in the sandy soil around here, and listening and learning from a few such Others, then I gain not just a stereoscopic, but a trioscopic or quadriscopic sense of this place, this realm, this watershed that I inhabit, a richer sense of how this land feels itself from a range of other perspectives.

            Then, as well, I might have a particular closeness to a certain plant, perhaps because it’s a plant that I ingest regularly and eat of its leaves. For me, it’s a plant I don’t ingest through my mouth, but through my eyes and my ears and my skin: the Aspen tree. There are some growing around my home, but there are huge aspen groves up the slope of these mountains where I live. And when I am ailing – if I’m physically ill, or if I’m just bummed out, if I’m going through a really difficult patch and melancholy has me in its grip – I know that if I just wander up into these mountains and get myself into the aspen groves and just sit there among those trees, or walk among them, or lie down and sleep in their midst, their medicine will ease what I’m going through. They are the most medicinal of trees for me, in any season. Whether it’s in the summer with their green resplendence, when the aspens are also very talkative – because, as everyone knows, aspens chatter and whisper among themselves. It has to do with their leaves, the stalks or petioles of aspen leaves are flat, yet their flatness is perpendicular to the leaf surface. So, when the slightest breeze comes, it wants to turn the stem this way, but it wants to turn the leaf that way; so the result is that the leaves will all start quaking and quivering. They whisper and chatter. But then, come autumn, those leaves turn a kind of honeyed gold, and it seems the mountains are all cloaked with Jason’s golden fleece. But then, once those leaves fall to the ground, the fractalled richness of the bare white aspen branches against the blue of the sky, and the trunks and branches, as you know, are a bright white, yet etched with black markings that often look like eyes staring back at you. And, in the winter, as the snow blankets the mountain’s ground, the aspen trunks, white etched with black project their long black shadows upon the white snow, creating a dizzying chiaroscuro of black on white on black and white to walk through, or glide through on skis. So in every season, aspen offers up this sense-altering medicine for those of us who are given to its magic, who are aspen-struck. They form a key part of my identity here.

            But your question, Tema, reached further still, probing into the mystery of shapeshifting. You suggested that few people have access to such experiences. Well, yes, and then again and deeply: No. With the experience that I described in Becoming Animal of actually entering into, and taking flight with, a raven I was at great pains to stick as closely as I could to the sensorial experiences that brought me to that unexpected moment. Because I now know that anytime I gaze at – or anyone gazes at – a bird as it takes flight, if we follow it closely with the focus of our eyes as that winged being swerves, swoops, turns, and glides, then my nervous system is synapsed through my eyes to its nervous system. My sentience is in direct contact with its sentience. There, already, is a kind of subtle shapeshifting that goes on all the time whenever we are really attending, really perceiving the world.

            And that’s what that whole series of lessons that led up to the experience with the raven taught me – that sensory perception itself is the deepest magic. I mean, here I am sitting, speaking with the two of you in the same room, and so you see me here, and I see you over there, yet there is all this space between us. So, how is this happening? Is something of me gliding out through my eyes and making contact with you over there where you sit? Or is something of you actually pouring through this space and sliding in through my eyes over here? Neither of those seem quite right, but obviously something is happening, because I am perceiving you, Tema, and you’re perceiving me at the same time. We’re both perceiving José. So somewhere between there and here is, and perhaps at every point between us, this mingling and interchange that is happening. There is a subtle exchange and mutual informing of one another. That’s what perception is.

            One of my recent discoveries in this vein comes from having noticed for a long time how much pleasure I and some others receive from the color green. That it’s not just a visual pleasure, but when I’m out in the world and I see a green hillside – particularly when the sun just emerges from a bunch of clouds and is spilling its radiance across that hillside – there’s this visceral and tactile pleasure that rolls across my skin. The color green feeds me in this way. And when the green is variegated, composed of different mosses, grasses, and leaves or needles, of different hues and colors, as in the American northwest, for instance, the pleasure can be almost orgasmic – always heightened when sunlight hits it for the first time.

            At a certain moment I found myself pondering this and then realizing that, well, all of these green beings are engaged in photosynthesis. And yet I grew up being schooled to think that photosynthesis was a set of automatic, almost mechanical happenings within the physiology of a tree or a plant, whereby that plant is transforming sunlight into matter, sugar, oxygen. But, basically, these leaves are eating or drinking the sunlight and morphing it, transforming it, alchemizing it into their flesh. In the way I’d been taught, this all happens automatically, without any sensation accompanying the metamorphosis, which now seems really bizarre to me – the idea that such a thing would not be accompanied by feeling, would not be accompanied by some qualities of sensation. What kind of sensation? Well, I don’t know, but I would imagine it would be a kind of intense pleasure, a delicious quality of feeling. And of course that those sensations would be heightened whenever sunlight strikes that leaf or that grassy field. And I suddenly realized that, wait a minute! – the pleasure that I feel in the color green, is this not a kind of empathy in the eyes? That is, are my eyes perhaps picking up something of what these beings themselves are sensing and feeling as the sunlight spills across them? So when I look at a forested hillside, I now recognize the sunlit green as a kind of ecstasy rippling across the folded contours of that hillside. Which is just to say that a kind of shapeshifting is happening all the time when we stay close to our senses, and linger with them, and let them saturate our conscious awareness.

            As I wrote in Becoming Animal, the human body is our very capacity for metamorphosis. The body is a shapeshifting being – it changes shape with every gesture and movement of our limbs, and every facial expression we make. Our body is this exquisitely tuned instrument that can reverberate any and every part of the sensuous terrain, can shape itself to feel into any part of the world. My body is a variant of every other being or body in the landscape. The stones, the rocks, the boulders jutting out from the flanks of this mountain, these cliffs – well, I have my own stony or bony constitution. The streams and waters flowing down from this mountain are echoed deeply in the bloodstream and circulatory system of my organism. But my body also has its leafy aspects – I mean perhaps my hair is kindred to the leaves of these trees. Which is just simply to say that we have within our bodies echoes of every other bodily presence around us, even if they be very distant echoes. And everything, conversely, every part of the landscape, is a distant variant of my own flesh. After all, we are all constituted of the same stuff. And so we have within us this magical capacity to feel into and empathize with pretty much anything of the Earth – because we ourselves are, first and foremost, pieces of Earth. And, so, a kind of shapeshifting is just native to the human organism. It’s our birthright.

CASTRO-SOTOMAYOR: I was thinking while you were speaking about to what extent being engaged with, or being conscious or awake to, this sensible body helps us question or interrogate those other layers we have imposed upon or between us – ethnicity, race, gender, ability, etc. Recently, for instance, I was walking through a street with these beautiful trees in the median. I was walking through this beautiful median garden, immersing myself and conversing with the trees and the leaves, looking at the colors and the sunbeams, and really enjoying myself. And suddenly, I caught myself thinking, ‘I am deep in the ecological dimension, but my body is still like this.’ You see, I am bearded, I am darker skinned. So, I am in the ecological dimension but, also, I could be affected by these other dimensions, like gender and ethnicity, or the color of my skin. For some, in comparison to these other cultural categories that identify me, the ecological dimension is unimportant or even irrelevant. In an academic discussion about identities, I witnessed one scholar accusing another of being frivolous, of thinking of ‘happiness and the universe’ when talking about the ecological dimension of our identities or experiences. The ecological was dismissed as not meaningful in the charged political context we are living right now. But it is immensely relevant. And I have discovered, personally, that it is a way of moving and understanding that actually opens different ways of interrogating our worlds.

ABRAM: Well, as we’ve already mentioned, as humans we seem to have lived for 99 percent of our time within this biosphere as hunters and gatherers, in a deeply animistic context. In a context, that is, wherein we assumed that everything is alive, that everything is, in some sense, awake and aware. Inevitably, then, we found ourselves negotiating relationships with every aspect of the sensorial terrain. The beings that we touched – the ground, the textured bark of a tree – were also touching us. That bony, stony boulder we moved our hand over, with its lichen-encrusted fissures, was also feeling my hand and sampling the chemistry of my skin. It seems likely that we felt ourselves in this kind of multi-relational exchange all the time, negotiating relationships with insects, with birds of flight, with animals peering down at us from branches, or looking up at us from clumps of grass, but even with the ground itself – since the ground seemed to feel our weight as we walked upon it. Now, this is not to say that this was easy, or even fun. Any relationship, any intimate relationship, is really hard – and you stumble across really fraught edges and get frustrated with one another. It’s mighty difficult, and plenty dangerous, as well, and I think that’s also what it is to be in relation – in intimate carnal relation – with the flesh of the wind and the soil and the rain. It’s difficult as hell, but it’s also deeply nourishing, and it feeds what Mary Oliver calls the soft animal of our body.

            And if this was our most basic, longstanding modality of ancestral life, well, consider: Suddenly we’re born into a civilization that defines away the life and animate agency of all these other shapes of sentience. ‘Yes, sure, those animals are alive, but they’re not really sentient, they’re certainly not conscious. In fact, they probably don’t have feelings at all. If they’re plants, rocks – forget it. There’s no sensibility whatsoever. The ground? Give me a break. The wind, the rain? Are you mad?’ Countless things that, to an animistic sensibility, were felt to be alive, animate, and hence engaged relationally with us whenever we encounter them, are now defined as being inert, inanimate, or basically determinate, mechanical processes that happen automatically. There’s no spontaneity, no real creativity outside the human sphere.

            Suddenly then, we found ourselves cut off from all of those difficult but nourishing relationships that used to feed us. Nonetheless our nervous system still knows, still craves that rich nourishment – that full round nourishment it once got from its living interchange with hummingbird and mountain and spider, from sunrise and crescent moon and thunder cloud. But now all those presences are just passive stuff. The only place I can turn for relationship is toward another human – because humans are the only things that are truly conscious in the world as we currently construe it. So, I turn toward my sweetheart, my lover, my spouse, craving this deep and multiplicitous otherness, and demanding, wanting, desiring something of that from her or from him. Yet another person, shaped so much like ourselves, cannot possibly provide all of that diverse and manifold otherness we once felt in the world. And so, it’s like, ‘I really love you, darling, but I’m just not feeling met by you. It’s just not happening!’ And I think that this frustration blows apart so many of our relationships, one after another. For this bodily organism is still needing, still craving this multiplicitous otherness!

            It’s a situation that renders all our human relationships remarkably brittle and breakable. Yeah, brittle, that’s the right word. Not just our intimate relationships, but our relationships with persons in our community, and communities themselves become much more harsh, fragmentary, prone to breakage at many different points. Even international relations become far more brittle when they’re not nested within a broader matrix of interchange with the mountains and rivers, with an Earth that we sense is actively supporting us as we walk upon it, within an atmosphere that is actively nourishing us as we drink of it. No – we now assume that all of this just happens automatically, and so we don’t pay it any mind. We focus all our attention upon our human relationships, which stay profoundly fragile and breakable as a result.

            It seems to me that opening up to one’s ecocultural identity – waking up as a bodily animal engaged in relationship with so many other beings – eases the fragility and brittleness in all our human relationships. Including, especially, those edges within our internecine human struggles with one another – our ethnic grapplings with one another that we keep firing up and filing the edges of so that we can grate, and cut, and slice into one another. Why are we so ready to take offense, why are we so impatient with one another, so badass mean to each other? Because we are all cut off, by the nature-demeaning norms and naturedestructive habits of this commercial civilization, from the wider field of relationships. Yet we’re still craving it, still needing participation in that animate world. Because it’s our birthright to be engaged within a much wider and a much wilder range of relationships and reciprocities with other beings, and with the otherness of our world.

            Consider a city like Los Angeles, composed of a broad array of ethnic communities – groups of Vietnamese Americans interacting with the Mexican Americans, bumping up against the Jewish Americans and the African American community and the Filipino community. But every now and then – particularly during a prolonged drought, or in a summer that’s stiflingly hot – these edges snag on one another and sometimes give rise to violent clashes and flare ups and riots. Because these different communities with their divergent thought-styles and habit really don’t have much in common with one another. Except this one thing, this very big thing that they do have in common: the actual place where they live. If they could collectively turn away from one another toward the place that enfolds them, if we stop glaring at each other and turn toward the ground underfoot, and inquire of the ground, ‘What do you ask of us here? What does this place ask of those of us who live here?’ that simple gesture – turning away from our preoccupation with one another toward the needs of the terrain where we all live – would begin to draw the human collective, with all of its differences, into a new alignment with itself.

            If, in Israel–Palestine, these two warring, pissed off factions – ancient cousins – were to stop nursing their endless grievances with one another and turn to the land and to the waters, and ask, ‘What do you need from us? What does this place ask of any humans who choose to live here?’ – and began listening closely for the reply – that, it seems to me is the only solution to that cycle of unending violence. Beginning to give precedence to the needs of the more-than-human terrain over our strictly human concerns. And I do think that it alone can bring a solution. But the proof would and will be in the pudding, and in the eating of the pudding. I think this is the edge where we’re at right now as a civilization, as a species, as a planet.

 MILSTEIN: This is certainly in line with the aim of this Handbook, to expand beyond the destructive fiction of a purely human realm and to reconnect with our always ecological and earthly selves. In addition to inter-group conflict, marginalization, erasure, and violence, there are other dynamics, also fed and kept volatile by the governing structures and corporate institutions of our times, that seem to unremittingly shape and stunt our identities. One that comes to mind is today’s hyper-consumerism – the craving of, and over-identification with, stuff.

ABRAM: There are so many who say the problem is that we’re too materialistic a culture, and that our problem is our materialism. But I am one of those who would say, ‘No, the problem is that we are not materialistic enough.’ We don’t care about the materials we use, from which we fashion our chairs and our buildings. We don’t identify with our own materiality, with our own bodily thickness and density and weight. And so we treat matter as though we were outside it, in a very aloof and detached fashion, and this is one way of understanding the ecological crisis: that it is born from, or generated by, a culture – a human culture – that relates to the world as though it were not part of that world, as though we are spirits that just happened to alight here and got stuck in these bodies. And we’re kind of pissed at our body for imprisoning us, so we treat our body and the body of the Earth as though it was something for us to instrumentalize, manipulate, engineer, and master and control, rather than how we would engage this world if we really identified with our materiality and realized that we were completely in and of the Earth – pieces of Earth – and, hence, that the Earth is our real Body, our larger Flesh.

MILSTEIN: You point out in the introduction to Becoming Animal that you don't accord a lot of space to the social or political in that book, because there’s a necessary work of recuperation to be accomplished before the social and political spheres can be reconfigured. And I feel like we’ve been talking about recuperation for most of this conversation. How do you see such a recuperation eventually, maybe directly, leading to things like replenished social and political participation, climate wellbeing solidarity, and environmental and social justice? How do we move from nourishing identities that are recuperative and replenishing to invoking that scale of change?

ABRAM: I just think we don’t have a hoot of a chance of healing our social justice issues until we begin including the more-than-human world within our sense of the socius, or the community. I just don’t think real community is possible, for instance, anymore without turning toward and realizing that the human community is nested within, or embedded within, a more-than-human community of beings. And so, feeling the active support of the ground underfoot, and honoring the soil, and – when we’re frustrated in another community gathering or town hall meeting – stepping outside to just go and consult one of the old trees and just say, ‘Geez, how do I do this?’ and listen! And take what comes from the tree and its response, or what it suggests obliquely to my body, the insight it brings me when I just rest in its shade for a minute or three, and then step back into that town hall meeting. I just don’t think we can do it alone, and I think that is the source of a lot of our problems, as well as the source of a lot of the ills that are now befalling the wider ecology. We can’t do it alone, and we wreck the world when we try to. So, I do think bringing place into the equation is utterly key. Bringing the Earth into the political equation is massively important. Earth in its sphericality – what are the consequences of living arrayed around the surface of a sphere? I don’t think we’ve even broached this yet in our international relations. But just as important, and more so, is bringing place into the political equation. Place and the Politics of Wonder – that was the name of a book I was intending to write. I proposed that one and Becoming Animal, and the publisher just went for Becoming Animal.

CASTRO-SOTOMAYOR: Have you developed the idea about the politics of wonder someplace else?

ABRAM: Not at great length, not yet. But some of these things are very obvious and have been spoken of for a very long time. We’re now living in these nation-state constructs where, you know, between New Mexico and Arizona, or between New Mexico and Texas, or between New Mexico and Colorado, there are these straight lines that run across the map. Between the United States and Canada, another straight line. And we have to then work out our politics and economics accordingly. But, of course, these straight lines have nothing to do with ecological reality.

            As we were saying earlier, the Earth articulates itself in richly different ecosystems, different bioregions. Once we realize that that’s the reality of what’s here and ask: What is the actual watershed I inhabit? What are the contours of this realm wherein the humans, the other animals, and the trees and herbs are sharing the same water? Once I discern its actual contours, I’ll see it’s different from the broad Pecos watershed on the other side of the Sangre de Cristo mountains above my home – the water there is different, the minerals in that water are different. What are the forms of culture, of community, and collective solidarity that are called for by this ecosystem? And, working closely with others – with brothers and with sisters and with the other animals – to make space to ensure that we can all flourish here, and many of us – the humans, in particular – will have to give up certain things (like, say, golf courses) so that all us beings can flourish together in this land. But it does seem to me that a much more place-based politics is what’s called for, one increasingly attuned to the bioregional contours and ecological realities, rather than the artificially drawn straight lines and right angle boundaries of the nation-state.

            Our species is in a massive, planet-wide crisis from which there’s no guarantee that we will survive. What is clear, what really aches, is that we’re taking down countless other eloquent, beautiful beings as we tumble. Yet there’s this slowly dawning awareness that we inhabit a breathing biosphere – a vast spherical metabolism upon whose flourishing our individual lives all depend. Perhaps this growing recognition of our common Flesh can free us – not, hopefully, into some global homogeneity of consciousness, but to accept the invitation of gravity and settle back down into our particular places, attuning to the uniqueness of the local earth wherever we find ourselves, becoming half-decent citizens of the bioregional commonwealth. Perhaps we can relax into our differences, and the divergent rhythms of our particular places, because we’re now awake to the framing-place that holds our individual places within it. As I mentioned earlier, perhaps for the first time it’s really possible to understand that the health and integrity of this bioregion depends upon the flourishing integrity of every other bioregion, and indeed that each ecosystem necessarily calls for its own uniquely wild form of culture. In the long run, let us hope, there’ll be a re-diversification of human culture, even in some sense a re-indigenizing of culture, within a sense of our larger identity as Earth. This breathing planet experiencing itself in and through an outrageous multiplicity of divergent cultures, expressing itself through a thousand and one styles and traditions – each place, each creature, each individual (whether finned or fingered or feathered, whether antlered or leafing or covered in lichen) a unique expression of the manifold weirdness of this whirling world.

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References

Abram, D. (1996). The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-Than-Human World. New York: Vintage Books.

Abram, D. (2011). Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. New York: Vintage Books.