How did we collectively lose this intimate experience of nature? This is not a casual question: Abram suggests it may be at the root of our environmental crisis, and may contain the only solution to it. In his book The Spell of the Sensuous, he presents an intriguing hypothesis: he links “nature blindness” to the practice of alphabetic writing. While pictographic scripts like Chinese, Mayan, and Ancient Egyptian refer to natural forms, the Greek alphabet—not to mention the Roman characters you are reading now—reference only the phonemes of human speech, creating an abstract, exclusively human world. Abram compellingly cites studies of oral cultures to show that their speech is inextricably bound with non-human life forms and the landscapes that they inhabit.
Non-literate peoples, he suggests, experience nature immediately, personally, and intimately: a mode sometimes designated by the term “animism.” It is exceedingly difficult,” Abram writes, “for us literates to experience anything approaching the vividness and intensity with which surrounding nature presents itself to the members of an indigenous oral community.”[5] When we began to write and read, Abram claims, “The participatory proclivity of the senses was simply transferred from the depths of the surrounding life-world to the visible letters of the alphabet.”[6] When we read, we unconsciously endow the abstract shapes of letters with an uncanny life, coming to our minds as voices and images, appropriating the vitality with which humans formerly perceived the natural world.
http://www.humansandnature.org/how-to-walk-on-the-earth