David Abram, PhD, is a cultural ecologist and philosopher. He is the founder and creative director of the Alliance for Wild Ethics. His books include Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology and The Spell of the Sensuous: Perception and Language in a More-than-Human World. In this piecve for Emergence Magazine he writes about the opportunity COVID-19 presents us to be more aware of our place within GAIA, to be aware of the gross injustices of our fossil-fuel driven economy, and to strive to build a more sane and more fair new world.
“We have no autonomy, no integrity as a species separate from the other species of this world, no collective existence as a creature apart from the animate Earth. We can understand ourselves, and feel what it is to be human, only through our interaction and engagement with all these other, nonhuman beings with whom our lives are so thoroughly tangled.”