In Memoriam Paul Shepard (1925-1996)

        WE NOTE WITH regret the death this year of Paul Shepard, America's leading ecological philosopher. An engaging stylist and committed environmental activist, Shepard deserves to be ranked among the pioneers of ecopsychology. In his groundbreaking 1982 study Nature and Madness, he launched the first searching discussion of the interplay between human psychology and humankind's increasingly destructive environmental behavior. His analysis amounted to a radically ecological rereading of cultural history as well as of individual neurosis.

        In Shepard's view the ecocidal habits of our species are far from a contemporary aberration on the part of industrial society. He saw them as rooted in a form of "ontogenetic crippling" that reaches back to the invention of agriculture, the crucial point at which human culture achieved a false sense of separation from the natural habitat. Writing as both ecologist and psychologist, Shepard analyzed the changing patterns of child rearing that stem from the major cultural transformations of human history. In focusing upon the "fantasies of power and heroics" that dominate human, mainly male, adolescent development, he substantiated insights about gender roles that have since been investigated by ecofeminists and feminist psychologists. Yet, as deeply embedded as our collective madness may be, Shepard offered the hopeful possibility that "an ecologically harmonious sense of self and world" is equally intrinsic in our nature. It is, he said, "the latent possession of everyone; it is latent in the organism, in the genome and early experience."

        Other works of note by Shepard include The Subversive Science, Man in the Landscape, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, and The Others: How Animals Made Us Human. His latest work, published just before his death, is The Only World We've Got (Sierra Club Books). It is highly recommended.

        Once, our species did live in stable harmony with the natural environment (and in some small groups it still does). This was not because people were incapable of changing their environment or lacked acumen; it was not simply on account of a holistic or reverent attitude; rather, there was some more enveloping and deeper reason. The change to a more hostile stance toward nature began between five and ten thousand years ago and became more destructive and less accountable with the progress of civilization. The economic and material demands of growing villages and towns are, I believe, not causes but results of this change. In concert with advancing knowledge and human organization it wrenched the ancient social machinery that had limited human births. It fostered a new sense of human mastery and the extirpation of nonhuman life. In hindsight this change has been explained in terms of necessity or as the decline of ancient gods. But more likely it was irrational (though not unlogical) and unconscious, a kind of failure in some fundamental dimension of human existence, an irrationality beyond mistakenness, a kind of madness. ...

        I have attempted to identify crucial factors in such normal growth by showing what might have been lost from the past. Some of this, such as life in a small human group in a spacious world, will be difficult to recover though not impossible for the critical period in the individual passage. Adults, weaned to the wrong music, cut short from their own potential, are not the best of mentors. The problem may be more difficult to understand than to solve. Beneath the veneer of civilization, in the trite phrase of humanism, lies not the barbarian and the animal, but the human in us who knows what is right and necessary for becoming fully human: birth in gentle surroundings, a rich nonhuman environment, juvenile tasks with simple tools, the discipline of natural history, play at being animals, 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 kinds, clan membership and small-group life, and the profound claims and liberation of ritual initiation and subsequent stages of adult mentorship. There is a secret person undamaged in each of us, aware of the validity of these conditions, sensitive to their right moments in our lives. All of them are assimilated in perverted forms in modern society: our profound love of animals twisted into pets, zoos, decorations, and entertainment; our search for poetic wholeness subverted by the model of the machine instead of the body; the moment of pubertal idealism shunted into nationalism or otherworldly religion instead of an ecosophical cosmology.

        We have not lost, and cannot lose, the genuine impulse. It awaits only an authentic expression. The task is not to start by recapturing the theme of a reconciliation with the earth in all of its metaphysical subtlety, but with something much more direct and simple that will yield its own healing metaphysics.
                        from Nature and Madness