PaulShepardInfluence

How, I thought to myself, could psychologists have missed this?

Morris Berman, author of The Reenchantment of the World, Coming to Our Senses: Body and Spirit in the
Hidden History of the West, and Wandering God: A Study in Nomadic Spirituality

"I first ran across Paul Shepard's work in the mid-Seventies, in San Francisco. [Poet and editor] Peter
Berg handed me a copy of The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, saying, "Have a look at this; this
is a whole different way of thinking." Indeed it was. To someone caught in the traditional categories of the
social and behavioral sciences, Paul's analysis of the origins of human malaise, and his vision of culture
being restored to sanity, came as something of a revelation. The anthropological notion, that our humanity
had to be recovered from the past if we were to have any prospect of a future, was for me a powerful idea,
and made its way into the concluding pages of the book I was working on, The Reenchantment of the
World.

...A few years later I was teaching at the University of Victoria in British Columbia. Orion Nature
Quarterly sent me a copy of a book to review: Nature and Madness, by Paul Shepard. As I eagerly read
through what Paul modestly described as a "progress report," I realized that this slim volume bordered on
genius. What, after all, is a genius? A genius has (at least) two characteristics: (a) He or she does not
remind you of anyone else; and (b) Once they stated what they have to say, the whole thing becomes
obvious, even though it was previously invisible...For me the key contribution was the notion of the crucial
role played by the nonhuman other-i.e. the natural world-in the psychological development of human
beings, particularly infants and young children. How, I thought to myself, could psychologists have
missed this?....Human ontogeny devoid of regular interaction with the animal world was a twentieth
century aberration, and accounted for a lot of the craziness of the contemporary sociopolitical landscape."

from "A Tribute to Paul Shepard" by Morris Berman, cultural historian and social critic, The Company of
Others.

In one fell swoop, the psychosocial dynamic of the contemporary world
revealed!

Chellis Glendinning, author of My Name Is Chellis, I'm In Recovery From Western Civilization, and
When Technology Wounds: The Human Consequences of Progress.

"In recent years I have wondered, after an occasional late-night dip into Lewis Mumford, if I
would ever meet up with another thinker whose work competes with that of my chosen mentor.
The challenge, I thought, would surely extend beyond mere intelligence, grasp of detail, or
sweep of vision; the contender would have to be a writer, articulate and passionate. As reader,
I would-by my own intolerance of the ecstasy of ideas-have to drop the book into my lap every
few pages and breathe.

Who would guess that the earnest professor pacing back and forth before the
chalkboard in Biology 101 would, twenty-five years later, emerge as Mumford's match....He
was tall, bearded, preoccupied. Oh sure, we dissected the frogs, collected the butterflies, and
debated nature vs. nurture. But there was something else. Paul Shepard was the only college
teacher I ever knew to take the class into the...wilds, all the while seeding our minds with
dangerously holistic notions like...ecology.

[Years later] Nature and Madness changed my work and days....Mumford's brilliance
carved a crystalline picture of what is wrong with mass technological civilization and our lives
within it. Shepard sanctioned this view, deepened it with rare psychohistorical insight-and then
went on to open the door to what could be right. I remember the moment distinctly. I was
lying on the couch in my office, a luscious July breeze blowing in through the door, alternately
reading the book and dropping it in my lap to breathe.

"In the ideology of farming,' he offered,' wild things are enemies of the tame; the wild
Other is not the context but the opponent of 'my' domain. Impulses, fears, and dreams-the
realm of the unconscious no longer are represented by the community of wild things with which
I can work out a meaningful relationship. The unconscious is driven deeper and away with the
wilderness. New definitions of the self by trade and political subordination in part replace the
metaphoric reciprocity between natural and cultural in the totemic life of the hunter-foragers.
But the new system defines by exclusion. What had been a complementary entity embracing
friendly and dangerous parts of a unified cosmos now takes on the colors of hostility and
fragmentation."

The unconscious is driven deeper and away with the wilderness! In one fell swoop, the
psychosocial dynamic of the contemporary world revealed!

I read the first few pages, and it would not let me go....

C.L. Rawlins, author of In Gravity National Park, Broken Country: Mountains and Memory and
Sky's Witness: A Year on the Wind River Range

"[I found Nature and Madness] ten years after it was published, in 1993 on a remainder table
in Moab Utah. I was on a reading tour for a book of my own, short on cash, but was struck
by the title. I read the first few pages, and it would not let me go....

My appreciation for Nature and Madness comes not out of esteem for the scholarship, fine
though it is, but because the book has become part of my life. I read it with a thrill of
recognition. More than any other single work, Nature and Madness illuminates my past,
confirms my present, and assures me, in the deepest way, that I belong to this world....You
do not have to stop believing in the rocky integrity of our world in order to accept yourself.
And this is the fatal flaw, as Shepard describes it, in our current state of belief....Given the
depth of our predicament, Shepard offers a curiously hopeful diagnosis: we can still grow up.
Despite all, we can learn how the world works and learn to be good animals, not fallen
angels. We have not lost the ability, which is innate, but only missed the chance."

from the foreword to the University of Georgia edition of Paul Shepard's Nature and
Madness by poet, essayist and High Country News editor-at-large C. L. Rawlins.

His words had changed my life

Barbara Dean, Island Press editor of Paul Shepard's The Others, Traces of an
Omnivore, Coming Home to the Pleistocene and Encounters With Nature:

"Before I had the opportunity to be Paul Shepard's editor, his words had changed my
life. From the first month I moved to this square mile of remote northern California land
in 1971, after a lifetime of living in cities and suburbs, I knew I had found the place
where I wanted to live for the rest of my life. I was 25 then, and had a very romantic
view of nature; I thought of moving to the country as trying to "become one with" the
natural world. That, I realize now, was a city-bred idea; real life in nature is much
more complex and challenging....A few years after I moved here...a friend recommended
Paul's Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game. I devoured the book, pen in hand, and
experienced one of those rare clicks of deep recognition. Ah, yes, I thought, this is the
way it is. Paul described a different dynamic-not losing oneself in nature, but rather a
rich and endlessly stimulating exchange of life and growth. Suddenly I had words for
my experience here. His description of the 'other' was a revelation; my longing for
unity was replaced with a fascination with otherness."

from "Paul Shepard" by Island Press editor Barbara Dean in Wild Duck Review Vol. III
No. 3 August 1997.

Paul's books helped me go deeper than this

Steve Chase, editor of Defending the Earth:

"While I was pleased to read Paul's condemnations of empire, genocide, and the
destructiveness of our corporate economy, I have learned much more about all of these things
from other people. Paul's gift to me was much more challenging. He took me off the beaten
path of the radical politics I had known. He took me beyond the 500 years of European and
capitalist expansion. He took me beyond the ten to twelve thousand years of human civilization,
so marred by social hierarchies. He took me to the deep evolutionary history of our species and
the more-than-human world that first called forth and sculpted those human qualities I treasure
most.

Martin Luther King once said, "The universe is so structured that things go awry if men
are not diligent in their cultivation of the other-regarding dimension." This has been my
underlying view of the world since I was a child. Yet, in my teens and early-twenties, I limited
this "other-regarding" only to other human beings. Paul's books helped me go deeper than this,
to regard the intrinsic value, and vital human importance, of non-human others. His words
changed me.

Yet the seeds of his words were also powerful because they found fertile soil in my lived
experience as a child, experiences in which Paul played an important part....My [earliest]
memories of him are mostly as the man who ran Greek Oaks, the biological field station for
Knox College, where both he and my father taught. Our two families spent an infinite number of
days and nights at Green Oaks: swimming, fishing, hiking, tracking, stargazing, playing, and
telling stories around the fire. It was at Green Oaks that Paul taught me to talk with crows. It
was at Green Oaks where I felt freest, happiest, and the most at home. This was Paul's world.
In my child's mind, he made it possible for me to live like this."

from "A Memorial Homily" by Steve Chase, in Wild Duck Review.

I owe everything to Paul Shepard

Dolores La Chapelle, author of Earth Wisdom, and D.H. Lawrence:
Future Primitive:

"I owe everything to Paul Shepard. Without his early support of my
work I could have gone no further. ...In the final paragraph of his
book ]Nature and Madness], Shepard points out, "Beneath the veneer of
civilization, to paraphrase the trite phrase of humanism, lies not
the barbarian and animal, but the human in us who knows the rightness
of birth in gentle surroundings, the necessity of a rich non-human
environment, play at being animals, the discipline of natural
history, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the expressive arts of
receiving food as a spiritual gift rather than as a product, the
cultivation of metaphorical significance of natural phenomena of all
kind...There is a secret person undamaged in every individual, aware
of the validity of these, sensitive to their right moments in our
lives...."

from "Tribute to Paul Shepard" by director of the Way of the Mountain
Learning Center Dolores La Chapelle in Wild Duck Review, 1997.

A pioneer in the best, healing sense of the word

Calvin Luther Martin, author of The Way of the Human Being:

"Paul deeply influenced me...the most important thing I can say is that [his books]
gave the rest of us courage-courage to say what we are saying in our own books,
our lectures, our conversations. Our thoughts. Paul was a leader for many people,
I think. A pioneer in the best, healing sense of the word. I consider him one of
the leading nature philosophers of all time, along with Thoreau, Muir, Leopold,
and Eisley."

Quoted by Florence Shepard in Wild Duck Review, 1997.

These words seem to me as beautiful and urgent as anything
I've read

Barbara Ras, University of Georgia Press Editor of new editions of Paul Shepard's
Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Thinking Animals and Nature and
Madness:

"At the end of the Preface to The Only World We've Got, Shepard, on a hopeful
note, says, "The generic human in us knows how to dance the animal, knows the
strength of clan membership and the profound claims and liberations of daily rites of
thanksgiving. Hidden from history, this secret person is undamaged in each of us and
may be called forth by the most ordinary acts of life." These words seem to me as
beautiful and urgent as anything I've read. My own hope is that when enough of us
finally learn how to dance the animal and learn to live up to the model of spirit and
sanity that Paul Shepard provides, we will not be the only animals left to dance."

from "How to Dance the Animal" by University of Georgia Press Senior Editor
Barbara Ras in Wild Duck Review, 1997.

An ideal colleague

Douglas L. Wilson, author of Honor's Voice: The Transformation of Abraham
Lincoln:

'"One of the great windfalls of my academic career was starting out on the same
college faculty as Paul Shepard. When I landed at Knox College in 1961, it soon
became evident that a gentle, soft-spoken biologist was not only regarded as the
leading scholar on the faculty, but that his ideas had made a noticeable impact on his
colleagues. they were all aware, for example, of the prime significance of ecology, a
study with, at that time, no standing or general recognition whatsoever in the public at
large. His scientific interests reached into so many other disciplines-art, history,
philosophy, anthropology-that he was, for a liberal arts faculty, an ideal colleague. As
my own intellectual and research interests developed, Paul Shepard's wide-ranging
model, which ignored traditional disciplinary boundaries, proved an inspiration, and
touching base with him from time to time became a source of stimulation and
encouragement."

"The Fate of Jefferson's Farmer" by retired professor of English and co-director of
the Lincoln Studies Center at Knox College, Douglas L. Wilson, in The Company of
Others.

He writes about the human experience of nature as
encoded and celebrated in language

William Severini Kowinski, author of The Malling of America:

"I finally exchanged letters with Paul Shepard, but he was already in the
last year of his life. So I never met him, and my contact with him has all
been in words on pages. I admire his writing as writing, where we get at
substance only through style. It was clear to me from the first pages of
Man in the Landscape that to produce those trenchant, elegant sentences
Shepard had to be a natural born writer who worked at the writing craft.
His enthusiasm for writing is evident in his overflows of imagery, as well as
alliterations, assonances, slant rhymes and rhythms, and rhetoric, at times
Shakespearian in their music, their playful density and multiple meanings.
He writes about the human experience of nature as encoded and
celebrated in language. Animals animate words, and in The Sacred Claw
Shepard shepherds some that derive from human encounters with bears,
such as 'berserk,' 'brightness' and maybe even 'dance.' Rhythmic music
and dance are essential to Paleolithic cultures and their sacramental
relationship with nature, Shepard writes. Writing has its own music and
incorporates its own dance. In The Others, he admits that "I am leery of
my own enthusiasm for writing," asking, "Is our relationship to animals
essentially a branch of nature writing?" But he also saw it as part of the
human journey. "The human mind came into existence tracking, which for
us creates a land of named places and fosters narration, the tale of
adventure."

from "The Ecology of Maturity" by writer William Severini Kowinski in Wild
Duck Review, 1997.

It's your life he can help explain to you

David L. Petersen, author of Elkheart: A Personal Tribute to Wapiti and Their World :

"Certainly there were other significant teachers, exemplars, and mentors before I found
Paul Shepard....But it would take Paul Shepard to conjoin all the loose ends with his
scientifically rigorous and spiritually satisfying vision-speaking, gently teaching, through a
synergetic series of books, his prose often painfully academic yet uniquely elegant, subtly
humorous and magnetically attractive, as rich and heady as good Irish cream. And while
it's mostly my own life Shepard has explained to me, it's your life he can help explain to
you."

from his introduction to Paul Shepard's Encounters with Nature by naturalist and writer
David L. Petersen.