Excerpts (from https://emergencemagazine.org/interview/the-ecology-of-perception/)

Well, one of the most common misreadings of my work and of my research has been to say, “Oh, Abram is suggesting that writing is bad and that the alphabet is the cause of all our problems.” This is a terrible misreading, because I’m a writer and I love the written word and I love to read, and I’m deeply given to the exquisite power of the written word to open wonders. I’m not at all claiming—and this is quite important—I’m not at all suggesting that writing is bad, but, rather, that writing is magic, and that the alphabet is a very potent form of magic, a very concentrated form of animism.

For our Indigenous ancestors, one could be wandering through the terrain and have one’s attention snagged by a boulder with patches of crinkly black and red lichen spreading on their surface, and you would focus your eyes on a patch of lichen and abruptly hear the rock speaking to you. Well, that’s not so different from us waking up in the morning, walking to the kitchen, opening up the paper, and focusing our eyes on a few bits of ink on the page, and suddenly we hear voices and we see visions of events happening in the White House or in Iraq.

We focus our eyes on these ostensibly inanimate bits of ink on the page and we hear voices, conversations unfolding between people on the far side of the world. This is animism, folks. It’s an intensely concentrated form of animism, but it’s animism, nonetheless; as outrageous as a talking stone. We just do it with our own scratches and scripts. Our oral ancestors were doing the same thing with bent twigs, tree forms, leaves, cloud shapes, animal tracks — everything in the surrounding terrain was speaking to us. But this new, very concentrated form of animism only speaks with a human voice, and the words that we experience as we read are human words.

So, again, the alphabet closes us into a space of exclusively human meaning and verbiage, while the wider, more-than-human terrain doesn’t seem to speak at all. And in that sense, this new, very concentrated form of magic that we call the alphabet makes possible the forgetting of the lives and perspectives of all the other animals, of the plants, of the mountains and rivers. It doesn’t force us to forget these other beings, but it makes possible that we begin to neglect them.

So, I’m not saying writing is bad. I’m saying writing is a magic, and only when we recognize it as such can we use it responsibly. If we don’t recognize writing as a very potent magic—that is, as something that has much more than rational effects upon our experience—if we don’t recognize it as a magic, we tend to fall under its spell. The word “spell” has that double meaning, both to cast a magic within the world and also simply to arrange the letters. But those two meanings were once one and the same, because to learn to read with this new magic was to cast a kind of spell upon our own senses.

…

I’m not in any way trying to reduce the mystery of spirit to the wind, but rather to expand our sense of the wind and the breath and the air as something irreducibly weird and richly mysterious and deeply magical and filled with meaning: this meaning-filled plenum in which we find ourselves bodily immersed, from which we drink steadily to fire our hearts and our awareness. It does seem to me that one very interesting way of looking at climate change is to recognize that climate change is the simple consequence of forgetting the holiness of the invisible medium and beginning to treat it as just empty space.