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Impact in the 21st CenturyAuthor: Simbi Foundation
Welcome! Youve arrived at Impact in the 21st Century, a podcast which shines a light on stories of positive impact and the inspiring individuals and organizations who are creating it. Each episode is a chance for you to hear from an incredible impact-maker about the work they are doing, how they found their passion and set off on their journey to make a positive difference, and how we can all be leading more impactful lives. Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast created by Simbi Foundation, a non-profit organization working to support the next 3.5 million refugee learners with solar-powered classrooms called BrightBoxes. Learn more at www.simbifoundation.org/podcast Language: en Genres: Business, Non-Profit, Society & Culture Contact email: Get it Feed URL: Get it iTunes ID: Get it Trailer: |
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EP #34: David Abram - The Spell of the Sensuous | Perception, Language, and the Living Earth
Episode 34
Wednesday, 15 April, 2026
David Abram is an ecologist, philosopher, and sleight-of-hand magician whose work sits at the intersection of phenomenology, linguistics, and our embodied relationship with the more-than-human world. Author of The Spell of the Sensuous and Becoming Animal, David is one of the most original and necessary voices asking what we lose when language severs us from the living land and what it takes to find our way back. In this rich and unhurried conversation, David and Aaron explore: Why tracking, reading wind, footprint, and silence, is humanity's original literacy, and what alphabetic writing cost us when it displaced that older way of knowing How oral, place-based cultures encode intelligence in the landscape itself, and why that wisdom cannot survive transplantation into a book The phenomenology of perception: how breath, texture, and animal encounter invite a kind of participation with the world that abstract thinking actively forecloses The animism underlying Indigenous cosmologies, not as superstition, but as a precise description of how attention actually works What it means to be a body among bodies, and why the ecological crisis is, at its root, a crisis of the senses How the alphabet quietly re-routed human attention away from the living world and toward a self-enclosed human conversation The rise of AI and what it means when the dominant intelligence shaping our language, perception, and knowledge is no longer rooted in a body, a place, or the breathing earth Practical, grounded ways to reawaken sensory presence, and why this is not a romantic retreat from modernity, but its most urgent frontier This is a conversation about the oldest question: what does it mean to be fully alive and fully here? And it arrives at exactly the right moment. Learn more about David's work at davidabram.org đī¸ What is Impact in the 21st Century? Impact in the 21st Century is a podcast that celebrates the impactful work being done around the globe and shares the stories of the inspiring individuals behind it. đ¤ Who hosts the podcast? Aaron Friedland is a National Geographic Explorer, PhD Candidate in Econometrics at UBC, and Founder of the Simbi Foundation. đĻģ Who makes it sound good? Tom Foster is an Award-Winning Recording Engineer and Cinematographer, Up-and-Coming Composer, Film Scoring Student at Berklee College of Music, and Head of Audio & Music for the Sea Change Project. This podcast is brought to you by Simbi Foundation & The Goood Life.








