From the mating calls of chorus frogs to insect olfaction to elephant funerary rites to the memory-rich tastes of place, Sensoria offers an immersion in the sensual experiences of seeing, hearing, touching, tasting, and smelling—and their interactions, combinations, and more-than-human manifestations. This shimmering volume of sensation from Humans & Nature Press proposes possibilities and practices to heighten and expand readers’ empathic imaginations and sensory awareness of the natural world through everyday experiences with nature.

Humans, along with all other creatures, are an entanglement of sensual relations, shaping and shaped by our somatic engagement with the world. The essays and poetry of Sensoria transport readers into compelling stories and ethical reflections that stretch the limits of the moral imagination, calling attention to the wondrous ways in which humans and other-than-human beings experience and perceive the world, not just through the senses but within them. By exploring the sensorium among all forms of life endowed with different kinds of consciousness and communicative abilities, this volume highlights ecologically and socially diverse ways of touching the world with mind, and touching mind with the world.

The sensory faculties are inherently about the capability of paying attention to other beings and forces that share our planet and whose lives are interwoven with our own. For each of the five senses, the contributors to Sensoria—including music composer David Rothenberg, historian of color Carolyn Purnell, bio-philosopher Andreas Weber, filmmaker Kalyanee Mam, neuroethologist Bill Hansson, travel writer and novelist Nick Hunt, and religious scholar Graham Harvey—explore and illuminate the biology and neurology of sensation as well as the imaginative possibilities for understanding the senses. This timely volume offers readers new ways of understanding relations in everyday encounters that link our inner and outer awareness—embodied experiences that shape what we see, hear, touch, taste, and smell, and the way these perceptions can help us to attend more closely and respectfully to the lifeworlds of other-than-human creatures.

“A collection as diverse and generative as the senses themselves. Rich in experience and insight, these writings awaken and invite. Through vibrant and compelling stories and juxtapositions, we’re called to deeper perception, embodied engagement, and right action grounded in the sensory riches of the living Earth.”—David George Haskell, biologist and two-time Pulitzer-finalist author of How Flowers Made our World, Sounds Wild and Broken, The Songs of Trees, and The Forest Unseen

About The Author

Bruce Jennings is Developmental Editor of Humans & Nature Press Books and Senior Fellow at the Center for Humans and Nature. He is on the faculty of Vanderbilt University in the Center for Biomedical Ethics and Society and in the Department of Health Policy. He is a Fellow of The Hastings Center, where he was on the research staff from 1980-2006 and served as Executive Vice President from 1991 through 1999. He has published widely on ethical and social issues in hospital treatment decision making, palliative care, and hospice. He was the co-founder of the “Decisions Near the End of Life” program, an educational and practice change program that was conducted in over 200 hospitals in 20 states from 1990-1996. Jennings has been a leader in ethics research and education in the field of public health. He was on the faculty of the School of Public Health at Yale University and worked on ethics education with the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention. In 2019 he received a lifetime achievement award from the American Public Health Association for his work in public health ethics. He has written or edited over thirty books, including Ecological Governance: Toward a New Social Contract with the Earth. More about Bruce and his work can be found at https://my.vanderbilt.edu/brucejennings/about-me/

Dr. Gavin Van Horn is the executive editor of Humans & Nature Press Books, the author of The Way of Coyote, and the co-editor of City Creatures: Animal Encounters in the Chicago Wilderness, Wildness: Relations of People and Place, the award-winning five-volume series Kinship: Belonging in a World of Relations, and the five-volume series Elementals. He currently resides in the ancestral lands of the Northern Chumash people in San Luis Obispo, California, where you can find him wandering the nearby hills and shores, senses awakened by sage, hummingbirds, and ocean air. More about Gavin and his work can be found at www.storyforager.com.

Heather Swan, PhD, is a poet and nonfiction writer. Her most recent collection of poems, Dandelion, was released from Terrapin Books in 2023. Her first poetry book, A Kinship with Ash (Terrapin Books), published in 2020, was a finalist for both the ASLE Book Award and the Julie Suk Award. Her book Where Honeybees Thrive (Penn State Press) won the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award. A companion book, Where the Grass Still Sings: Stories of Insects and Interconnection, was just released in May 2024. Her nonfiction has appeared in such journals as The Sun, Emergence, and Minding Nature, among others. She has been the recipient of the August Derleth Poetry Award, the Wisconsin Fellowship of Poets Best Chapbook Award, the Martha Meier Renk Fellowship in Poetry at UW Madison, and an Illinois Arts Council Poetry Fellowship Award. She teaches environmental literature and writing at UW Madison.