"Humans are tuned for relationships..... for the largest part of our species’ existence, humans have negotiated relationships with every aspect of the sensuous surroundings, exchanging possibilities with every ... form. All could speak, articulating in gesture and whistle and sigh a shifting web of meanings that we felt on our skin or inhaled through our nostrils or focused with our listening ears, and to which we replied -- whether through sounds or through movements of minute shifts of mood ... and every sound was a voice, every scrape a meeting -- with Thunder, with Oak, with Dragonfly. And from these relationships our collective sensibilities were nourished. We have an ages-old reciprocity with the many voiced landscape."
Dave Abrams’ simple premise is that we are human beings “only when we are in contact and in conviviality with what is not human.”