Works by
Paul Shepard
(aka Paul Howe Shepard, Jr.)
(Writer)
[1925 - 1996]

Writing

• Environ/mental: Essays On the Planet As a Home  (1971)
  Contributors include Betty J. Meggers, Carl O. Sauer, Charles A. Lindbergh, Eleanor Karp, Eugene P. Odum, F. Fraser Darling,Harold F. Searles, John B. Calhoun, John Napier, Mort Karp, Paul Ehrlich,
  Scott Paradise, Walter J. Ong, and others.

• Nature and Madness (1982)

• The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (1982)

• The Only World We've Got : A Paul Shepard Reader (1996)
  Selected by the author from his many books, here in one volume is an overview of a brilliant and controversial career. Paul Shepard has long been revered as an elder of the environmental movement, and now the writings that have won such widespread admiration from his peers are available in a single volume. These powerful selections range provocatively from human ecology to environmental perception to the nature of sanity and our relationships with our fellow animals.
  
  Shepard has been an ardent voice crying out for the wilderness, as well as for its non-human inhabitants. We need them, he believes, not to subjugate to human use and productivity, but as elemental teachers who show us the wisdom of the natural world and our appropriate relationship to it. Many of Shepard's conclusions on the ills of society were reached by observing how far we have come from a pre-agrarian time when we participated in the natural order without subverting it to our desires.
  
  The writings of Paul Shepard are a fascinating journey along the route back to a healthy future.

• The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (1995)
  The Others is a fascinating and wide-ranging examination of how diverse cultures have thought about, reacted to, and interacted with animals. Shepard argues that humans evolved watching other animal species, participating in their world, suffering them as parasites, wearing their feathers and skins, and making tools of their bones and antlers. For millennia, we have communicated their significance by dancing, sculpting, performing, imaging, narrating, and thinking them. The human species cannot be fully itself without these others.
  
  Shepard considers 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. We must understand what to make of our encounters with animals, because as we prosper they vanish, and ultimately our prosperity may amount to nothing without them.

• Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence (1998)

• Traces of an Omnivore (1996)
  Paul Shepard is one of the most profound and original thinkers of our time. He has helped define the field of human ecology, and has played a vital role in the development of what have come to be known as environmental philosophy, ecophilosophy, and deep ecology-new ways of thinking about human-environment interactions that ultimately hold great promise for healing the bonds between humans and the natural world. Traces of an Omnivore presents a readable and accessible introduction to this seminal thinker and writer.
  
  Throughout his long and distinguished career, Paul Shepard has addressed the most fundamental question of life: Who are we? An oft-repeated theme of his writing is what he sees as the central fact of our existence: that our genetic heritage, formed by three million years of hunting and gathering remains essentially unchanged. Shepard argues that this, "our wild Pleistocene genome," influences everything from human neurology and ontogeny to our pathologies, social structure, myths, and cosmology.
  
  While Shepard's writings travel widely across the intellectual landscape, exploring topics as diverse as aesthetics, the bear, hunting, perception, agriculture, human ontogeny, history, animal rights, domestication, post-modern deconstruction, tourism, vegetarianism, the iconography of animals, the Hudson River school of painters, human ecology, theoretical psychology, and metaphysics, the fundamental importance of our genetic makeup is the predominant theme of this collection.
  
  As John S. Turner states in an eloquent and enlightening introduction, the essays gathered here "address controversy 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."

• Coming Home to the Pleistocene (1998) with Florence R. Shepard, ed.
  Paul Shepard was one of the most profound and original thinkers of our time. Seminal works like The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game , Thinking Animals, and Nature and Madness introduced readers to new and provocative ideas about humanity and its relationship to the natural world. Throughout his long and distinguished career, Shepard returned repeatedly to his guiding theme, the central tenet of his thought: that our essential human nature is a product of our genetic heritage, formed through thousands of years of evolution during the Pleistocene epoch, and that the current subversion of that Pleistocene heritage lies at the heart of today's ecological and social ills.
  
  Coming Home to the Pleistocene provides the fullest explanation of that theme. Completed just before his death in the summer of 1996, it represents the culmination of Paul Shepard's life work and constitutes the clearest, most accessible expression of his ideas. The book pulls together the threads of his vision, considers new research and thinking that expands his own ideas, and integrates material within a new matrix of scientific thought that both enriches his original insights and allows them to be considered in a broader context of current intellectual controversies. In addition, the book explicitly addresses the fundamental question raised by Shepard's work: What can we do to recreate a life more in tune with our genetic roots? In this book, Shepard presents concrete suggestions for fostering the kinds of ecological settings and cultural practices that are optimal for human health and well-being.
  
  Coming Home to the Pleistocene is a valuable book for those familiar with the life and work of Paul Shepard, as well as for new readers seeking an accessible introduction to and overview of his thought.

Editing

• The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (1964) with Daniel McKinley
  Contains articles by Alan W. Watts, Edith Cobb, Edward S. Deevy, G. Evelyn Hutchinson, Paul B. Sears, Jacquetta Hawkes, John Collier, John B. Jackson, Lynn White, Jr. Rene Dubos, and others.

• Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature (1967)
  A pioneering exploration of the roots of our attitudes toward nature, Paul Shepard's most seminal work is as challenging and provocative today as when it first appeared in 1967. Man in the Landscape was among the first books of a new genre that has elucidated the ideas, beliefs, and images that lie behind our modern destruction and conservation of the natural world. Departing from the traditional study of land use as a history of technology, this book explores the emergence of modern attitudes in literature, art, and architecture--their evolutionary past and their taproot in European and Mediterranean cultures. With humor and wit, Shepard considers the influence of Christianity on ideas of nature, the absence of an ethic of nature in modern philosophy, and the obsessive themes of dominance and control as elements of the modern mind. In his discussions of the exploration of the American West, the establishment of the first national parks, and the reactions of pioneers to their totally new habitat, he identifies the transport of traditional imagery into new places as a sort of cultural baggage.

• The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature (1985) with Barry Sanders

• Encounters with Nature: Essays By Paul Shepard (1999), Florence R. Shepard, ed.

• Where We Belong Beyond Abstraction in Perceiving Nature (2003) with Florence R. Shepard
  Gathered here in book form for the first time, the fourteen essays in Where We Belong exemplify Paul Shepard's interdisciplinary approach to human interaction with the natural world. Drawn from Shepard's entire career and presented chronologically, these pieces vary in setting from the Hudson River Valley to the American prairie to New Zealand. Equally impressive is Shepard's spatial range, as he moves from subtle differences to grand designs, from the intimacy of an artist's brushstroke to a vista of the harsh Greek terrain.
  
  Alluding to a range of sources from Star Trek to Marshall McLuhan to the Bible, the writings discuss such topics as the geomorphology of New England landscape paintings, beautification and conservation projects, the Oregon Trail, and tourism. Whether Shepard is pondering why the Great Plains conjured up sea imagery in early observers, or how pioneers often resorted to architectural terms--temple, castle, bridge, tower--when naming the West's natural formations, he exposes, and thus invites us to unshoulder, the cultural and historical baggage we bring to the physiological act of seeing. Throughout the book, Shepard seeks the antecedents of environmental perception and questions whether the paradigm we inherited should be superseded by one that leads us to a greater concern for the ecological health of the planet.
  
  This volume is an important addition to Shepard's canon if only for the new view it offers of his intellectual development. More important, however, is that these selections demonstrate Shepard's grasp of a wide range of ideas related to the physical environment, including the various factors--historical, aesthetic, and psychological--that have shaped our attitudes toward the natural world and color the way we see it.

See also:

• The Biophilia Hypothesis (1993), Edward O. Wilson and Stephen R. Kellert, eds.
  "Biophilia" is the term coined by Edward O. Wilson to describe what he believes is our innate affinity for the natural world. In his landmark book Biophilia, he examined how our tendency to focus on life and lifelike processes might be a biologically based need, integral to our development as individuals and as a species. That idea has caught the imagination of diverse thinkers.
  
  The Biophilia Hypothesis brings together the views of some of the most creative scientists of our time, each attempting to amplify and refine the concept of biophilia. The variety of perspectives - psychological, biological, cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic - frame the theoretical issues by presenting empirical evidence that supports or refutes the hypothesis. Numerous examples illustrate the idea that biophilia and its converse, biophobia, have a genetic component:

  • fear, and even full-blown phobias of snakes and spiders are quick to develop with very little negative reinforcement, while more threatening modern artifacts - knives, guns, automobiles - rarely elicit such a response

  • people find trees that are climbable and have a broad, umbrella-like canopy more attractive than trees without these characteristics

  • people would rather look at water, green vegetation, or flowers than built structures of glass and concrete

  The biophilia hypothesis, if substantiated, provides a powerful argument for the conservation of biological diversity. More important, it implies serious consequences for our well-being as society becomes further estranged from the natural world. Relentless environmental destruction could have a significant impact on our quality of life, not just materially but psychologically and even spiritually.

• Reinventing Nature?: Responses To Postmodern Deconstruction (1995)
  How much of science is culturally constructed? How much depends on language and metaphor? How do our ideas about nature connect with reality? Can nature be "reinvented" through theme parks and malls, or through restoration.
  
  Reinventing Nature? is an interdisciplinary investigation of how perceptions and conceptions of nature affect both the individual experience and society's management of nature. Leading thinkers from a variety of fields - philosophy, psychology, sociology, public policy, forestry, and others - address the conflict between perception and reality of nature, each from a different perspective. The editors of the volume provide an insightful introductory chapter that places the book in the context of contemporary debates and a concluding chapter that brings together themes and draws conclusions from the dialogue.
  
  In addition to the editors, contributors include Albert Borgmann, David Graber, Donald Worster, Gary P. Nabhan, N. Katherine Hayles, Paul Shepard, and Stephen R. Kellert, .

• The Company of Others: Essays in Celebration of Paul Shepard (1995), Max Oelschlaeger, ed.