PaulShepardindex

Theodore Roszak called him "our premier environmental philosopher." Kirkpatrick Sale said he was
"one of the few great ecological thinkers of our [20th] century, and may even belong in that special
pantheon where such solons as Lewis Mumford, Rachel Carson, Fritz Schumacher and Jacques Ellul
reside."

"Paul Shepard's work represents one of the most important syntheses available today on the
subject of the human condition," said Morris Berman. "Paul Shepard is the most brilliant and
provocative intellect of our time," said Dave Foreman. Garrett Hardin described him as "Poetical as D.H.
Lawrence, wide-ranging as Darwin, Paul Shepard illuminates the predicament of modern man."

"Much of what we value in contemporary thought
about 'nature and culture' grew up in the seedbed of
Paul Shepard's thinking," says Barry Lopez. Peter
Matthiessen called him "An exceptionally clear thinker
who is also a lucid and exhilarating writer...His work is
valuable but very urgent, shining in the sun like the tip of a
vast iceberg of knowledge and reflection that supports it."

"In this century and a whole lot of others, no other thinker
has been anywhere near so visionary, prophetic,
revolutionary and important as Paul Shepard,"
concludes naturalist David L. Peterson. "Yet, if you know
about Paul Shepard - about the man, his vision, and his
books - you're a member of an anomalous minority."

Yet the names of his admirers (which also include notables as various as James Hillman, Terry Tempest
Williams, Joseph Eppes Brown and musician Paul Winter) are often more familiar than his. "He had a
vision so bold it must have scared off some readers, some students, a few publishers," wrote another
admirer, poet and essayist Gary Snyder. " Paul was a kind of poet of lost and future possibilities."

As a pioneer of the ecology movement, a teacher who inspired generations of students and colleagues,
and a scholar and writer whose work continues to grow in influence, Paul Shepard's profound contribution
to our understanding of what it means to be human-especially in relation to other animals and our
evolutionary past, but also to our culture and to each other-is central to his public legacy.

It is there in the title of his influential 1969 essay, "Ecology and Man-A Viewpoint," a clarion call that
provided the fledgling ecology movement with a profound and timeless challenge. It is there in the title of
his first book, Man in the Landscape. It became official in 1973 when Paul Shepard became Avery
Professor of Natural Philosophy and Human Ecology at Pitzer College and the Claremont Graduate
School, the first to hold a chair in human ecology anywhere. No one before, writes Jack Turner in the
introduction to one of Shepard's last books, "had looked at the relations between the human mind, its
habitat, and other species. It seems Homo sapiens had little interest in applying the ideas of ecology to
itself." But by the end of his tenure at Pitzer, Turner concludes, Shepard "had put human ecology on the
intellectual map."

But the effect was more than intellectual. Shepard and his work affected people deeply, viscerally,
emotionally and permanently. His ideas changed world views and re-oriented careers; he changed lives.

When he died in 1996 few of his books were in print. Today nearly all of them are, and more of his work
will appear in the near future. A flood of new research and new books by others build on his insights, on
such subjects as childhood and nature, the importance of place, humanity's physical and cultural
characteristics developed in the Pleistocene hunter-gatherer period, the shaping of civilization and history
by the structures of large-scale agriculture,and many others. But only in his work are these subjects
brought together in coherent and revelatory relationship to tell the story of the human past, the earth's
present, and what is crucial to the future of both. His work will always be relevant and essential.