PaulShepardBooks

His Books: Paul Shepard on Paul Shepard

Paul Shepard wrote and spoke on various occasions about the
progression of his books. Two such summaries follow. The first is from a
1994 interview, the second from The Others,(Island Press,1996.) In this
second summary, he mentions that The Others returns to the concerns of
his 1978 book,Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of
Human Intelligence. Coming Home to the Pleistocene, edited by
Florence R. Shepard and published posthumously by Island Press in 1998,
similarly extended his 1973 book, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred
Game, and Nature and Madness, first published in 1982.

His other books (Traces of An Omnivore, Encounters with
Nature) are collections of essays and articles, and The Only World We've
Got is a selection of chapters from his first five books.

With the 2002 reprint of his first book, Man in the Landscape, the
University of Georgia Press has made his first four books available in
paperback editions. A collection of his essays on landscape, Where We
Belong: Beyond Abstraction in Perceiving Nature, edited by Florence R.
Shepard, is scheduled for publication in 2003 by the University of Georgia
Press. Complete citations of all editions follows in the Gallery.

Excerpts from an interview with Jonathan White (published in his book,
Talking on the Water: Conversations About Nature and Creativity, Sierra
Club Books 1994), beginning with Shepard's response to White's question,
"You describe yourself as a human ecologist. What does that mean?"

PAUL SHEPARD: It means that I consider human history and culture as
ecological factors. If I were studying the ecology of salamanders or
prairies, I wouldn't have to deal with culture or written history. In the
study of human ecology, however, I take as my primary data any evidence
I can find-ideologies, religions, myths, histories of thought-that has to do
with the way people interact with the environment. By environment, I
mean not just our social environment but the larger environment, including
the plants and animals around us.

My master's thesis at Yale [in the interdisciplinary conservation
program, directed by conservationist Paul Sears and evolutionary biologist
G. Evelyn Hutchinson] started out as a comparison of how landscape
painters saw nature and how I saw it as an ecologist. The project grew
into a doctoral dissertation [on] attitudes towards the American landscape
during the first part of the nineteenth century. My thesis involved
landscape painting and the history of gardening. And, as you can probably
guess, it didn't leave me as a particularly marketable graduate. I carried
that manuscript around for thirteen years, rewriting it endlessly, until it
was published under the title Man in the Landscape in 1967.

Just before it was published, I was beginning to doubt whether
landscape was an appropriate focal point for the study of human ecology.
The way we use and relate to landscape is too closely influenced by trends
and fashions. So I began reading anthropology. It was an exciting time in
that field, and also in paleontology and archaeology, because a lot of work
on the past and present-day hunter-gatherers was being done. These
studies required a return to my training in biology and zoology, and I
welcomed the chance to look for a new species model for understanding
what human ecology might entail.

I started that new search by writing a book on hunting, The
Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, which was a way of pulling
together my own thoughts on that subject. Thinking Animals came next,
which was an exploration of the role animals play in the thought processes
of pre-civilized or non-civilized people. Nature and Madness, published in
1982, looked at the human developmental process as it relates to the
natural world in a historical context. The Sacred Paw, which has a chapter
written by Barry Sanders, was a look at the ecology of a specific animal,
the bear. While I still have an interest in landscape, I am largely directed
toward the model of hunter-gatherers as a context for the study of our
own species' evolution."

Excerpts from the author's Introduction to
The Others:

"Memories of boyhood collecting somehow
inform my theory-a kind of miniature
presentment-that the human species emerged
enacting, dreaming, and thinking animals and
cannot be fully itself without them. Looking
back I can see that my work to this point has
been a circling round this idea as though I
had been imprinted by the movie westerns I
saw as a boy with the Indians circling the
wagon train. My first book, Man in the
Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics
of Nature, was like the sweeping "pan" shot
with which the scene opens. The Tender
Carnivore and the Sacred Game was a
somewhat rowdy assertion of the epitome of
love in the heart of the hunter. That foragers
were the first craftsmen of ideas, as animals
became terms in a language we still use, was
the subject of Thinking Animals. In Nature
and Madness I was fumbling with the concept
of ontogeny as the key to our relationships to
nature. With The Sacred Paw I attempted to
flesh out the human relationship to one
species as if no area of study were irrelevant.
In this book I return to the animals as Others
in a world where otherness of all kinds is in
danger, and in which otherness is essential to
the discovery of the true self."

"This book conveys ecology of the mind and spirit--of man's conceptual tools of art, psychology,
anthropology and myth-brought alive by Shepard's thorough and discerning scholarship and by his
considerable gifts as a writer and thinker...The first chapter, "The Eye," describes the most basic
perceptual debts of humans to their environment. The following chapters take us through subtle
changes in the structure of thought that coincide with the development of Western civilization,
and through to the traumas of the discovery of new continents and the advent of industrialism. In
defending the function of art, he writes: "Syllogism, analogy, metaphor has been led into
disrepute as mere devices. Their legitimate function is the communication of levels of
correspondence in a world of mysterious, multiple meanings." He goes on to say that the
prevalent view of art as merely a nice luxury has led to an analogous attitude toward nature:
"When art is misunderstood in this way, this evaluation may be transferred to the natural
environment, by the assumption that natural forms not created by economic man, such as
forests, are merely pleasant but unnecessary amenities.'

For those unsatisfied by pale paeans to a Disneyfied nature, Man in the Landscape
provides a deeper understanding of the multiform meshing of psyche and nature that we call
ecology."-- William Kowinski, Harper's Bookletter 1974

Edited by Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley. Introduction: Ecology and Man-A Viewpoint by Paul
Shepard. Contains articles by Edith Cobb, Edward S. Deevy, Paul B. Sears, Alan W. Watts, John B.
Jackson, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Rene Dubos, John Collier, Jacquetta Hawkes, Lynn White, Jr. and
others.

"The Subversive Science is subversive not in its approach but in its substance. In essays by
archeologists, anthropologists, biologists, landscape architects, philosophers, historians and
demographers, it relates man to his origins, his technical advancement, his earth, his fellow
creatures....But the sobriety of the writing, the distinction of many of the contributors, the fact that the
book is no product of recent panic, but the gleanings of 40 years of intelligent concern for the environment,
make it, as its general editor, Starker Leopold says, 'frightening.' This civilization has been set for
centuries on a suicide course." Wallace Stegner, Life Magazine 7/10/1970

Edited by Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley. Preface One by Paul Shepard. Contributors
include Eugene P. Odum, John Napier, Betty J. Meggers, Carl O. Sauer, Walter J. Ong,
Paul Ehrlich, Harold F. Searles, John B. Calhoun, Mort and Eleanor Karp, F. Fraser Darling,
Scott Paradise, Charles A. Lindbergh, and others.

"[This book] resembles its editors' earlier book in the breadth and quality of its content.
Its emphasis, however, is on man himself...Environ/Mental aspires to widen the reader's
understanding of the human dilemma which has arisen from our past faith in a
mechanistic culture and from the belief that expansion and development are synonymous
with progress. This book should contribute substantially to the emerging reappraisal of
human values."

A. Starker Leopold, Editor's Foreword

"In our earlier anthology, The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man, we attempted to
show that current problems are but a temporary configuration in an enduring and far broader set of
ecological interrelationships. The articles in this new collection are intended to illustrate the scope of
current environmental disorder and the variety of possible perspectives on it. In writing the headnotes to
each article in this volume, I have tried to remember that no one can fully grasp the impact of this
environmental revolution on our society, and that probably no one science or art holds the key to the
future."

Paul Shepard, from his Preface

"The ecological crisis has been ten thousand years in the making.... In [this book] Shepard
argues that the environmental crisis 'signifies a crippled state of consciousness as much as it
does damaged habitat. We have, in the course of a few thousand years, alienated ourselves
from our only home, planet Earth, our only time, the Pleistocene, and our only companions, our
fellow creatures....If we look upon the subjugation and annihilation of life as a failure of human
behavior, a kind of pathology in the horizons of a perfectly good species, then our
contemporary problems are unique only as a combination of symptoms.'...By tracing the origins
of the ecological crisis and the continuing loss of our essential humanness to an increasingly
altered human consciousness which began most dramatically with the transition from hunting
and gathering to an agricultural way of life, Shepard has produced the most radical and
thought-provoking analysis of our time."

George Sessions, foreword to new ed Tender Carnivore

"He knows that the environmental crisis and alienation of our times is less a product of bad technology than of
a distorted state of consciousness." --Rene Dubos

"He writes with freshness and an almost angry brilliance, as though he had grasped the
psychological need for natural ecosystems at the same moment they were disappearing from
an industrial world."

Barry Lopez

"Weaving experience, wide reading, and reflection together, he produces an intricate design whose clear
message is that man apart from the rest of the animal world is less than human." Paul B. Sears

"Reader beware! Many reasons might bring one to these pages, such as a love of animals,
environmental concern, or an interest in human psychology, but few are prepared for either
the radical inquiry or the remarkable range of evidence and subjects brought together here.
Published originally in 1973, this book foreshadows Paul Shepard's The Others: How Animals
Made Us Human, published in 1996, and is a necessary prelude to his later work. Yet on my
reading, Thinking Animals is intellectually more radical and stimulating."

Max Oelschlaeger, foreword 1998
edition.

Nature and Madness (1982), which Shepard believes is his most important book, combined the insights of
the previous works to outline a theory of human pathology. Shepard distinguished four historical periods-
the advent of agriculture, the asceticism of the desert fathers, the nature-hating of the Puritans, and the
rise of mechanistic science-and suggested how each distorted normal human ontogeny. The result, he
claimed, was a civilization of 'childish adults,'several billion Pleistocene mammals living in a state of
arrested development. Other authors-Eric Fromm for one-had claimed we live in a society no longer sane,
but no one before Shepard had suggested that a stunted relationship to the natural world caused our
insanity."

Jack Turner, Introduction to Traces of An Omnivore

"This is psychohistory on an imposing scale-passionate, flashing with insight, outrageous,
gutsy. Shepard has given us a bold, original account of modern environmental
destructiveness as a failed development of self. He proceeds from the view that, buried
under the layers of civilization, there is a natural human pattern of maturing, stunted and
deformed, but still, it may be, capable of rescue."

Donald Worster, author of Nature's Economy

"Here is an unrelenting diagnosis of arrested development in Western civilization; an intellectual and
scholarly tour de force which I feel certain will provide a new and brilliant touch-stone for modern
environmental inquiry. Nature and Madness will be of inestimable value to all who seek deeper
understanding of the genesis and evolution of our historic and contemporary cultural estrangement from
'reality.'" John A. Livingston, York University

"Nature and Madness constitutes a major contribution to the possibilities of human and
environmental liberation." Morris Berman in Orion

"Paul Shepard was critical in bringing to us a recognition that the natural world-and particularly the organic
aspect we respond to so strongly because it is connected to ourselves-is necessary to the development
of [human] intelligence." Stephen R. Kellert, co-editor of Children and Nature

"In Nature and Madness, Shepard explains what we suffer from and why. Unshielded by
myth or jargon, he explores the most dangerous human terrain, the yearning in which our
beliefs all find their origins. His genius is to refute their narrowness and cruelty, while
confirming their right, and ours, to exist. Instead he returns to the beauty that we might
have been, and that ancient, pathological event, our departure from the world our bodies
knew."

C.L. Rawlins, from the Foreword to the 1998 edition.

" Before there was an Earth Mother in human thought, the Bear Mother was there to represent the kinship of humans
and nature. [The bear's] story in human consciousness precedes agriculture and civilization, and begins with the seeds
of human self-awareness. When people first became acquainted with themselves, it was with the help of bears. The
lore of bears is the oldest evidence on earth for human spirituality."

Joseph W. Meeker, Minding the Earth Quarterly March 1985

"The Sacred Paw is an elegantly written and meticulously researched adventure for adventurous
minds...Bears are not just exemplars of nature's powers at work, but images of our own-apart from us,
a part of us all." Thomas MacNamee, author of The Grizzly Bear

"Reintroduces us to our animal shadow, its biological reality in the outdoors, its eternal grip on our cultural soul."

Peter Nabokov

Eleven chapters taken from Man in the Landscape, Thinking Animals, The Sacred Paw, The
Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, and Nature and Madness, edited and with a preface
by Paul Shepard.

"In this superb collection, Paul Shepard once again discovers the poetry that lies at the heart
of biology. There is no question but that Shepard is our premier environmental philosopher."

Theodore Roszak

"The Only World We've Got brings us back into the sanctity of Paul Shepard's texts, where we can once again
take a deep breath and remember that life is holy and a wildness of spirit is not only something to be retrieved
and honored but the very essence of our humanity." Terry Tempest Williams

"Much of what we value in contemporary thought about 'nature and culture' grew up in the
seedbed of Paul Shepard's thinking. His writing about child development, physical and cultural
anthropology, animal behavior, art and mythology, the history of agriculture, and other
subjects is endlessly stimulating." Barry Lopez

The Others: How Animals Make Us Human is accessible to general readers and stimulating to scholars
and is highly recommended as a wise, impassioned, and vastly significant contribution to our
understanding of human relationships with animals. The timing of its publication is fortuitous, for we are
presently faced with the challenge of making decisions that will determine the fate of the remaining wild
animals who, as this book demonstrates, not only are beautiful, numinous, and intrinsically valuable
parts of the web of life on earth but are vital to human thought, spirituality, identity, and well-being."

--Elizabeth Atwood Lawrence in American Anthropologist March 1997

"In this marvelously insightful and eloquently written book, Shepard explores both the
lavish beauty and the terrible dysfunction in our relationship to the animal world."

Richard Nelson, author of The Island Within and Make Prayers to the Raven

"Accessible and profound, Paul Shepard's The Others is a polished diamond of a grand idea-that without
wild animals in our lives, we are sure to lose contact with the roots and marrow of our humanity.
Shepard's determined quest and extraordinary grasp unite anthropology, evolution, philosophy, and
zoology, producing a prophetic warning about substituting a sanitized, virtual world for an intimacy with
animal and wild nature. This is a book that will educate all and transform many."

Michael Soule, Professor Emeritus, University of California, Santa Cruz

"In his vast and virtuosic explorations of The Others, he shows how essential this entire
animal eco-symphony is to the survival and maturation of our own song: and that only in
a world where animals can live in their authentic wildness, will we have a chance of
becoming fully human." Paul Winter, musician

"Shepard was a philosopher, an environmentalist, and the first person to hold a university chair
in human ecology. A highly original thinker and a nimble synthesizer, he was fascinated by the
phenomena of perception, the implications of our genetic heritage, and the connection between
wilderness and the imagination. Author of a set of remarkable books, Shepard is especially
engaging in essay form, and this posthumously published group of essays provides an ideal
introduction to his work. "

Donna Seaman Booklist

In these never-before-collected essays, written over the course of the last thirty
years, Shepard...writes with the power to shake your bones and change your
mind. The world looks very different by the time you turn the last page."

Steve Chase, Editor, Defending the Earth

"[These] essays discuss most of the major themes in his books. They are also lighter, more
accessible-preliminary sketches of what would become demanding studies. If he were an
artist, they would be his watercolors, not his oils. Traces of an Omnivore is thus a welcomed
introduction to Shepard's ideas....Paul Shepard is familiar with controversies. The essays in
Traces of An Omnivore address them with an intellectual courage uncommon in an age that
exults the relativist, the skeptic, and the cynic. Perused with care, they will reward the reader
with a deepened appreciation of what we so casually denigrate as primitive life-the only life we
have in the only world we will ever know."--Jack Turner from the Introduction

"These essays span more than thirty years of a rich and creative life. If we are
lucky, all of us will learn to think like Paul Shepard over the next twenty years.
He shows us all the way."

Joseph Meeker, author of The Comedy of Survival

"For those who love wilderness and wildness, and who look forward to a world in which human beings
will again flourish within the limits of the natural order, Paul Shepard is the most important American
thinker since Thoreau. During his long career as a professor and iconoclast, Shepard published a
series of brilliant and radical, but often difficult, books. Coming Home to the Pleistocene, beautifully
edited by Florence Shepard, distills and clarifies this work, serving both as a concise introduction to his
ideas and a bold summation of his vision." Jack Turner, author of The Abstract Wild

"Meandering through the labyrinths of Paul Shepard's mind is like seeing, hearing, tasting
the world, somehow, for the first time. In this, his last book, he revisits familiar themes:
the meaning of wildness and domestication, our ancient compact with other animals, the
ecological sources of our intelligence, and what it is to be sane. Shepard is one of the
giants of ecological insight, in a league with Leopold, Carson, Thoreau. His work stands
as a beacon, alone in its dazzling clarity. Reading him will long be an antidote to
madness." Donald Snow Editor, Northern Lights

"I cannot imagine a 21st century without our knowing Shepard's work here, or our Pleistocene selves
there. How else but out in the field will we become ineluctably keen, or use our irascible and gorgeous
intelligence well? How else will we recognize ignorance, claim competence, take up the work of
mortality-of hunts and gifts-and master the art of humility, of high play? How else will we call ourselves
human?"

Casey Walker, Editor, Wild Duck Review

"Shepard brought an original perspective to the environmental, psychological, and political
problems of modernity, identifying the importance of our relationship with wild Nature...to
our growth into mature humans. In this, his legacy may be as unique and profound as
Thoreau's." Wild Earth

"Paul Shepard may be regarded as one of the few great ecological thinkers of this century.
This book proves it." Kirkpatrick Sale, author of Dwellers in the Land: The Bioregional
Vision

"When I began to select and organize the essays for this book, I went first to
those Paul had singled out for publication and thought about the way he had put
them together. I then went beyond these essays to unpublished pieces. With
the help of Barbara Dean, editor at Island Press, and David Petersen, the author
of the introduction to this volume, I made the final selection. In this book I have
tried to cluster pieces that clarify the progression of his work in two primary
areas of interest, animals and place. The two parts are not arbitrary, but
neither should they be taken too literally, for each essay exemplifies Paul's
unified and interdisciplinary approach to research. One of the hallmarks of his
writing-a trait that has, at times, been a disadvantage since it cannot be
categorized clearly-is that it synthesizes view from diverse fields. My hope in
publishing these essays is to bring the two topics, animals and place, into
sharper focus for readers as well as illuminate the context of the life that
brought them into being." Florence R. Shepard, from the Preface