Paul Shepard

Infobox Writer
name = Paul Howe Shepard, Jr.


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birthdate = 1926
birthplace = Kansas City, MO
deathdate = July 27, 1996
deathplace = Salt Lake City, Utah
occupation = Author, Professor
nationality = American
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subject = Ecology, Domestication, Ecopsychology
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notableworks = The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Nature and Madness, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Where we Belong, the Others.
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Paul Howe Shepard, Jr. (1926 - 1996) is an American environmentalist and author best known for introducing the "Pleistocene paradigm" to deep ecology. His works have attempted to establish a normative framework in terms of evolutionary theory and developmental psychology. He offers a critique of (agricultural) civilizations and advocates modeling human lifestyles on those of prehistoric humans. He explores the connections between domestication, language, and cognition.

He died of lung cancer on July 21, 1996 in Salt Lake City. [Pace, Eric. "Paul Shepard Professor and Author, 71". Obituary in the "New York Times", July 22, 1996, page A15]

Based on his early study of modern ethnographic literature examining contemporary nature-based peoples, Shepard created a developmental model for understanding the role of sustained contact with nature in healthy human psychological development, positing that humans, having spent 99% of their social history in hunting and gathering environments, are therefore evolutionarily dependent on nature for proper emotional and psychological growth and development. Drawing from ideas of neoteny, Shepard postulated that many humans in post-agricultural society are often not fully mature, but are trapped in infantilism or an adolescent state.

Early life and Education

Shepard was born in Kansas City and earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Missouri. He went on to earn a doctorate from Yale, and his 1967 book "Man in the Landscape: a Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature" was based on his thesis. From 1973 until his retirement in 1994 he taught at Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate School.

Legacy

Shepard's books have become landmark texts among ecologists and helped pave the way for the modern primitivist train of thought, the essential elements being that "civilization" itself runs counter to human nature - that human nature, as Shepard so eloquently stated, is a consciousness shaped by our evolution and our environment. We are, essentially, "beings of the Paleolithic."

Some of his most influential books are "The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game", "Nature and Madness", "Coming Home to the Pleistocene", "Where we Belong", and "the Others".

References