Paul “hepard’s Bear Essay On Environmenal Ethics, Deep Ecology and Our Need for the Other-than-Human Animals With a Preface and Commentary by Roslyn M. Frank (bear essay) © 2016 by Roslyn M. Frank. This is an open access essay distributed in accordance with the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to distribute, remix, adapt and build upon this work, for commercial use, provided the original work is properly cited. See: http://creativecommons.org/license/by/4.0 Published 2016. Cover image with permission from: https://paulhoweshepard.wordpress.com/. Preface The short essay that is the topic of this article was written by Paul Shepard (1925-1996) during the spring of 1995. He sent it to me as his contribution to a joint article that we were preparing at the time for a Russian scientific journal. Unfortunately, Paul was diagnosed with cancer when we were still in the process of finishing the article. The essay was written during a brief respite in which he believed that he was in recovery. But his situation worsened and he died the following year. Twenty years have passed since Paul’s death and many things have changed including the level of public and scholarly interest in our relationships with other-than-human animals, including bears. Given the increasing concern for animals in general and wild animals in particular, I decided that it was time to share his Paul’s unpublished essay which until now had been gathering dust in one of my file folders. An avid outdoorsman and environmentalist who never smoked, Paul died on July 21, 1996, of lung cancer after an extended a valiant battle with the disease. His partner, Florence Krall Shepard, gives this account these last tragic years of his life: In October 1994, Paul Shepard was informed by his doctor that he had metastatic cancer and had only a short time to live. Until that time, being a man filled with great energy, motivation, and interest in life, he had never really considered dying. For several months he hovered, stunned, on the doorstep of death. Then, after a partial recovery, he began compiling notes and references for his last books. He then went back to his desk where he worked steadily until a few weeks before his death.1 As many know, the bear was a topic that Paul returned to over and over again in his writings, exploring the myriad of implications that the bear had for hunter-gatherer societies which persisted in seeing the bear as a relative 2 and often their ancestor. Today, in light of the much increased interest in other-thanhuman animals and the way that we humans have conceptualized our relationships with them, the many books and essays that Paul wrote during his lifetime dedicated to this theme take on a new meaning and relevance. In short, he was one of the first to emphasize the importance of this research area and link it to the deep ecology movement of the 1980s and 90s. He argued that we need contact with animals, most especially wild animals, for our own psychological well-being. Our separation from them and Nature is harmful in many respects and certainly the planetary crisis that all of humanity is now facing, and not just 1 2 Florence Krall Shepard, “Biography”: https://paulhoweshepard.wordpress.com/bio/. The bear was a recurring theme in his writings. Indeed, a number of his essays and one entire book were dedicated to exploring the ramifications of this topic: “Celebrations of the Bear,” The North American Review 270 (3) (September 1985): 17–25; “The significance of bears,” in Florence R. Shepard (ed.), Encounters with Nature: Essays by Paul Shepard (Washington, DC / Covelo, California: Island Press / Shearwater Books, 1999), pp. 92–97; “The biological bases of bear mythology and ceremonialism,” The Trumpeter: Journal of Ecosophy 23 (2) (2007): 74–79 and this book by Paul Shepard and Barry Sanders, The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature (NYC, NY: The Viking Press, 1985) (New York: Arcana Books, Penguin, 1992). the polar bears of the North, is further proof of how we have lost our way. In his writings Paul argues repeatedly that we are essentially "beings of the Paleolithic,” and that the processes of domestication which took place during the Neolithic, not just of animals but of humans, too, moved us increasingly away from Nature and decreased our awareness of the impact of our actions to the amazing Web of Life that exists around us. In recent years the role played by the bear in Europe has attracted significant attention, most particularly, the strong possibility that in a not too remote period in the past Europeans believed that they, too, descended from bears.3 Indeed, with each year that passes more and more remnants of this belief and the ursine cosmology that informed it are coming to light.4 Whereas Hallowell’s classic work on bear ceremonialism in the N. Hemisphere, published in 1926, was undoubtedly the first major attempt to bring together the vast body of ethnographic data, he was looking, for the most part, at geographical zones and a cultural complex, the so-called ‘circumpolar bear cult’, one that has not been understood as forming part of beliefs held by Europeans. Moreover, that early study was structured as a world-wide survey and not one that dealt in depth with the cognitive aspects of the belief system itself. In contrast, Paul’s essays and books offer the reader profound reflections on the symbolic and material role of the bear in human thought and culture. His work and the conversations that I had the privilege of having with him greatly impacted my own research. For instance, our discussions helped direct my attention to areas that I had not considered earlier, most particularly the symbolism of the figure of the bear in circumpolar cultures. Paul also helped me to recognize the fact that the bear is This is a topic that I have investigated for several decades. Cf. “A status report: A review of research on the origins and diffusion of the belief in a Sky Bear,” in Fabio Silva, Kim Malville, Tore Lomsdalen & Frank Ventura (eds.), The Materiality of the Sky: Proceedings of the 22 nd Conference of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture. (University of Wales, Lampeter: Sophia Centre Press), 79-87; “Bear Ceremonialism in relation to three ritual healers: The Basque salutariyua, the French marcou and the Italian maramao,” in Enrico Comba & Daniele Ormezzano (eds.), Uomini e Orsi: Morfologia del Selvaggio (Torino: Accedemia University Press, 2015), pp. 41–122, http://tinyurl.com/Hamalau14. A number of other publications of mine which deal with the European ursine genealogy are available online: http://uiowa.academia.edu/RoslynMFrank. Cf. also Yuri Berezkin, “The cosmic hunt,” Electronic Journal of Folklore, 31, (2005): 79–100. http://www.folklore.ee/folklore/vol31/berezkin.pdf. 3 4 Charles Fréger, Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage (Stockport, England: Dewi Lewis Publishing 2012). Cf. also http://www.charlesfreger.com/portfolio/wilder-mann/; Michel Pastoureau, The Bear: A History of a Fallen King (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press (2011). frequently integrated narratively into the stories told by traditional peoples about the stars of the Big Dipper and other stars adjacent to them.5 Two decades have passed since Paul left us and many things have changed including the level of public and scholarly interest in our relationship with other-than-human animals, including bears. So I’ve decided that it is now time to share his brief essay with readers. However, before doing so, I want give you a feel for the kinds of insights that Paul had, starting with a few quotes from his writings. Next comes an excerpt from a talk he gave in 1994 and finally the “(bear essay)” itself followed by a bibliography of his works. Paul called his text simply “(bear essay)”, a title that he wrote in lower case and enclosed in parens in the copy that he sent me in the spring of 1995. The full text of his essay, reproduced below, complements other essays and books in which he shared his profound reflections on the symbolic and material role of the bear in human thought and culture. That essay was, as I’ve mentioned, yet another of his meditations on bears. Two years earlier, in late 1994, Paul Shepard gave a talk he called “The Origin of the Metaphor: The Animal Connection,” as part of the “Writings on the Imagination” lecture series at the Museum of Natural History in NYC.6 He ended his remarks with “a letter delivered to me Roslyn M. Frank, “The origins of ‘Western’ constellations.” In C.L.N. Ruggles (ed.), The Handbook of Archaeoastronomy and Ethnoastronomy. Berlin: Springer Publishing Company, 2014), pp. 147–163, https://www.academia.edu/15305615/The_origins_of_Western_constellations; “The skylore of the indigenous peoples of Eurasia.” In C.L.N. Ruggles, pp. 1679–1686; “Sky Bear research: Implications for “Cultural Astronomy.” In Jean Paul Hernández, César González, Giulio Magli, Davide Nadali, Andrea Polcaro, Lorenzo Verderame (eds.), Proceedings of SEAC 2015 Conference. Astronomy in Past and Present Cultures. Rome, 9–13 November 2015. Rome University “La Sapienza”. Mediterranean Archaeology & Archaeometry; “A status report: A review of research on the origins and diffusion of the belief in a Sky Bear.” In Fabio Silva, Kim Malville, Tore Lomsdalen & Frank Ventura (eds.), The Materiality of the Sky: Proceedings of the 22nd Conference of the European Society for Astronomy in Culture (University of Wales, Lampeter: Sophia Centre Press, 2016); “Sky Bear research: Implications for “Cultural Astronomy.” In Jean Paul Hernández, César González, Giulio Magli, Davide Nadali, Andrea Polcaro, Lorenzo Verderame (eds.), Proceedings of SEAC 2015 Conference. Astronomy in Past and Present Cultures. Rome, 9–13 November 2015. Rome University “La Sapienza”. Mediterranean Archaeology & Archaeometry. 5 6 The full text of the talk is included in The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Island Press/Shearwater Books), pp. 331–333. by a bear,” addressed to humanity from the Others, the animals. These words were among the last spoken on a public occasion before his death from cancer in 1996. OTHER BEARS When I read Paul’s letter—delivered to him by a bear— I found it reminiscent of the poetry, dialogues, essays, drawings and paintings of N. Scott Momaday,7 who in his own prescient reflections in “The Bear-God Dialogues”, has the bear speaking not just to Yahweh but to all of us human animals with a message that becomes more relevant with each year, as this planet moves even more precariously toward that tipping point of no return. In this sense, the writings of these two men—both of whom repeatedly looked to the bear to find meaning in life and order in the universe, function as a vehicle for probing deeper philosophical and epistemological issues that face us as human animals, especially today. I recall how profoundly moved I was when I first read Paul’s essay “A Post-historic Primitivism”8 for at that stage, now some twenty-five years ago, I had never thought of the transition from forager to agriculturist from his perspective, one that privileges the values of the former rather than celebrating the contributions of agriculturalists and the attributing ‘civilization’ to them, an attribution that itself was built up in support of one of the classic asymmetric dichotomies of Western thought: nature vs. culture. For instance, concerning the intrinsically asymmetric dichotomies undergirding Western habits of thought and language which are now being contested on so many fronts, 9 Paul states the following in his incredibly rich volume Man in the Landscape which came out in 1967: “The Bear Dialogues” are included in a collection of short essays, poems, paintings and drawings called In the Bear’s House (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999). Cf. also his eerily poetic novel The Ancient Child (New York: Harper Perennial, 1989) in which the author reshapes an ancient Kiowa myth of a boy who turned into a bear. In doing so he produces a compelling work of fiction that probes spiritual dimensions of bear ceremonialism often forgotten by modern writers. 7 Paul Shepard, “A post-historic primitivism,” in Max Oelschlaeger (ed.), The Wilderness Condition: Essays on Environment and Civilization. (San Francisco: Sierra Club Books, 1992), pp. 40–89. 8 9 For over a decade I have been exploring these cognitive asymmetries in a series of publications. Cf. Roslyn M. Frank, “Shifting identities: A comparative study of Basque and Western cultural conceptualizations,” Cahiers of the Association for French Language Studies 11(2) (2005): 1–54, http://tinyurl.com/shiftingidenties-in-Basque; “Body and mind in Euskara: Contrasting dialogic and monologic subjectivities,” in Rosario Caballero-Rodríguez and Javier E. Díaz Vera (eds.), Sensuous Cognition: Explorations into Human It has taken four thousand years of struggle to ‘lift’ man ‘above’ nature. In the course of that struggle language and thought and behavior in the West have lapsed into a too-simple framework of discontinuity and opposition: spirit and body, mind and matter, earth and heaven, man and nature, good and evil. It is not an insoluble dilemma, but it is far more dangerous than we permit ourselves to know.”10 As Turner explains in his perceptive introduction to Paul’s collection of essays called Traces of an Omnivore: “The importance of our Pleistocene origins was already present in Shepard’s Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of Esthetics of Nature (1967), a work connecting two themes that would dominate his future essays: contact with animals as a necessary ingredient of normal human development, and more broadly, contact with the natural world as a basis for both individual and environmental maturity.”11 In 1969, Paul edited, with Daniel McKinley, a collection of readings called The Subversive Science: Essays Towards an Ecology of Man that along with their joint collection of essays from 1971, Environ/mental: Essays of the Planet at Home, served to introduce human ecology to a generation of students who were enrolling in newly created environmental studies programs which were springing up in colleges and universities around the country. The success that The Subversive Science enjoyed resulted not only from its innovative title, but also from Shepard’s insightful essay “Ecology and Man: A Viewpoint.” That essay contains several frequently quoted passages which introduce Paul’s version of the extended self, a theme that is now being explored in depth by many researchers. A few years later, namely, in 1973, Paul became the first person to hold a chair in human ecology and over the next decades he would radically change the meaning of this term. Although the expression came into use as early as 1921, “most of what had then been done in the field dealt with obscure issues in geography and demographics. In particular, no one 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.”12 However, after teaching at Smith, Williams and Dartmouth, Shepard was appointed to the newly created position of Avery Professor of Natural Philosophy and Human Ecology at Pitzer College and the Claremont Graduate School, at which point he immediately set about applying ecology to human beings. During his tenure at Claremont, Shepard would play an Sentience: Imagination, (E)motion and Perception (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 2013), pp. 19–51, http://tinyurl.com/body-mind-dialogic-monologic; “Shifting Identities: The metaphorics of nature-culture dualism in Western and Basque models of self,” Metaphorik.de 4 (2003): 66–96, http://preview.tinyurl.com/cultural-conceptualizations. 10 Paul Shepard, Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, [1967] 1991), p. 237. 11 Paul Shepard, Traces of an Omnivore, with an Introduction by Jack Turner (Washington, D. C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1996). Jack Turner, “Introduction,” in Paul Shepard, Traces of an Omnivore (Washington, D. C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1996), p. xiii. 12 important role in the creation of fields that are now known as environmental philosophy, ecophilosophy and deep ecology. The year after his appointment the Claremont Conference on “The Rights of NonHuman Nature” was instituted. The participants in this conference series included thinkers whose ideas would help define environmental philosophy for the next decade: Garrett Hardin, William Leiss, John Lilly, John Livingston, Joseph Meeker, Roderick Nash, Vine Deloria, Jr., Gary Snyder and George Sessions. As Turner has noted, over their lifetimes each of these people produced brilliant work, “but none had Shepard’s particular slant on what, after Earth Day, was described as an environmental crisis, and none would produce a body of work so systematically addressing human ecology—Homo sapiens’ relation to its habitat and to other species. No one says so clearly that the roots of the environmental crisis lay in the Pleistocene.”13 In 2000, Florence R. Shepard, Paul’s widow and Professor Emerita at the University of Utah, penned a very cogent summary of the key ideas of Paul’s work. She met and married Paul in 1985 and has been instrumental in getting many of the things he wrote during his illness into print as well as seeing that works of his that had gone out of print were republished. Concretely, following Paul’s death, she edited and published his last books: Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Encounters with Nature, and Where We Belong. With her own scholarly background zoology, biology and environmental education, she is also the author of several remarkable works in her on right,14 In her essay, she specifically speaks of his book Coming Home to the Pleistocene,” which appeared in print, posthumously, in 1998. The text, written during the last months of his life, is, in the words of his wife, “like a mirror held before us ‘thinking animals’ that reflects our primal human being. This image (if comprehended and lived fully, Paul counseled) can make us at home on planet Earth, rather than ecological misfits. We recognize this image, for at the heart of our identity is a fundamentally wild being, one who finds in the whole of wild nature all that is true and beautiful in this world.”15 Paul insisted that our most prized cognitive skills (that we wrongly attribute to the influence of civilization)—the ability to think and plan ahead, to match our intellect with others in collaboration, to synthesize many bits of information in appraising situations, to read signs, to create symbols that convey information, to design beautiful artistic expressions, to find joy in music and celebration and communion, to solve insurmountable obstacles 13 Turner, p. xiv. 14 Cf. Florence R. Shepard, Ecotone: Wayfaring on the Margins (Albany: State University of New York, 1994) and Sometimes Creek: A Wyoming Memoir (Durango, CO: Raven’s Eye Press, 2012). 15 Cf. Florence R. Shepard, “Coming to the wild,” USDA Forest Proceedings RMRS-P-14 (2000): 95. through the use of cunning, and to relate existence to the cosmos and acknowledge the spirit world—were not the legacy of civilization but were bequeathed us by our hunter-gatherer forebears. Summarizing Paul’s thesis concerning the negative effects of the so-called agricultural revolution, Florence writes: These changes came about as the result of two concomitant movements—through the domestication of plants and animals and the sedentary life that agriculture promulgated as well as through pastoralism, the keeping of herds that created the conditions for ownership and surplus and scarcity that stratified humans into classes. And with the horse and its harnessed power came the capacity for invading and conquering others. When Paul first put forward his thesis it was a major deviation from the standard line that human history started with the Neolithic; the standard spiel that contemporary huntergatherers and their Mesolithic ancestors were a less endowed, culturally and spiritually than their Neolithic descendants. Today, three decades later, Paul’s ideas are far more in accord with research being carried out on the belief systems of hunter-gatherers, past and present, as well as investigations into the traditional knowledge of indigenous peoples around the world. Undoubtedly, this reevaluation of foragers and their lifeways has come about because of a variety of factors, but there is little question in my mind that one of them is the increasing recognition that there is something fundamentally wrong with the asymmetric Nature vs. Culture, our linguistically entrenched habits of thought that place human beings at the apex of creation, endowed with rights denied to other animals. That type of “Great Chain of Being” thinking which has dominated Western thought for so long is now being challenged by those intent on rediscovering the relatedness of all beings, reaffirming the interdependence of all creatures, large and small, and revealing the intricacies of the increasingly fragile Web of Life that sustains us all. The following commentary which accompanied the publication of Paul’s work Traces of an Omnivore (2013) by Island Press provides an eloquent summary of his contribution to what today might be called cognitive ethology: 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 humanenvironment 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. The depth and breadth of Paul’s writings are truly remarkable as is the fact that with every year that passes his words become more relevant to our efforts to understand our past and present relationships to the other animals and species who inhabit this planet. 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 Jack 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." 16 At times Paul’s meditations on nature and the landscape remind me of Buddhist thought and the writings of Timothy Morton who often draws inspiration from the latter. In his 2008 essay, Morton expresses this definition of ecological thinking: Since we are not living in the mountains, distracted in them by day-to-day tasks, we can be aesthetically captivated by them, as we can by an auratic work of art. When it approaches fullness, ecological thinking does not allow this kind of distance to congeal. Thinking genuine interdependence involves dissolving the barrier between “over here” and “over there,” and more fundamentally, the illusory boundary between inside and outside, which Derrida asserts is the founding metaphysical opposition […]. This means that society can no longer be defined as purely human. Thinking interdependence involves thinking différance: the fact that all beings, not just symbolic ones, are related to each other negatively and differentially, in an open system without center or edge.17 Morton then asks the reader to consider the image of Indra’s net, used in Buddhist scripture to describe the interrelationship between things, using the following quote from the well-known Buddhist teacher Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche: At every connection in this infinite net hangs a magnificently polished and infinitely faceted jewel, which reflects in each of its facets all the facets of every other jewel in the net. Since the net itself, the number of jewels, and the facets of every jewel are infinite, the number of reflections is infinite as well.18 Compare the thoughts expressed above with this quote where Paul comments on the intricate, intimate and infinitely intertwined way in which life forms and our humanity interconnect: Ecological thinking…requires a kind of vision across boundaries. The epidermis of the skin is ecologically like a pond surface or a forest soil, not a shell so much as a delicate interpenetration. It reveals the self ennobled and extended, rather than threatened, as part of the landscape and the ecosystem, because the beauty and complexity of nature are continuous with ourselves.” –from the essay “Ecology and Man: A Viewpoint”19 As the future viability of our planet, as well as ourselves and the Others, becomes more precarious with each passing day, the writings of Paul Shepard take on even more meaning, 16 Cf. http://islandpress.org/book/traces-of-an-omnivore. 17 Timothy Morton, “Ecologocentrism,” SubStance #117, 37(3), (2008): 73–96. 18 Yongey Mingyur Rinpoche, The Joy of Living: Unlocking the Secret of Science and Happiness. New York: Harmony Books, 2007), pp. 174–175. 19 Published originally in The Subversive Science: Essays toward an Ecology of Man, Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley (eds.) (Boston: Houghton Mifflin Co., 1969), p. 2. For similar thoughts on the environmental crisis facing this planet, also published twenty years ago, cf. Holmes Rolston, III, Philosophy Gone Wild: Environmental Ethnics (Amherst: Prometheus Books, 1986). particularly his plea for a revolution in human consciousness, a shift from an anthropocentric to an ecocentric worldview. Whereas, according to George Sessions, ecocentrism made the Ecological Revolution the most radical and far-reaching movement of the 1960s, in 2016, the vast majority of the population is still “either ignorant of the magnitude and seriousness of the global ecological crisis or else in denial about it. Furthermore, most people do not understand the connection of this crisis to the ‘new world order’ of postmodern capitalism, with its global markets and universal consumerism.”20 In his introduction to the collection of essays called The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, published originally in 1973 and republished in 1998, Sessions describes Paul’s contribution to the mad rush to extinction. Speaking of these pervasive global markets and universal consumerism, Sessions focus on how reality has faded from view: Those embracing or habituated to the values of this economic and cultural system live in an anthropocentric fantasy world of their own creation, believing that the urban environment of commodities, advertising and entertainment is a ‘second nature’ transcending and replacing biological nature. Indeed, the social reality now being brought into existence by such postindustrial forces as multinational corporations and financial markets, electronic media and ‘megatechnology’ is one of the ‘simulacra’ and ‘hyperreality.’21 Today there are many writers who are deeply concerned with the environmental crisis and dedicated to exposing the lack of understanding that humans have with respect to the other animals on this planet. However, until now I have noticed a distinct lack of awareness on their part concerning the significant and highly prescient contributions of Paul Shepard to this debate. While Paul explored the interconnections between the economic, technological and ideological policies implicit in industrial societies and the environmental crisis, calling for a shift in consciousness, that shift still has not occurred. As early as 1969, in his essay “Ecology and Man”, Paul outlined these connections clearly: “A kind of madness arises from the prevailing nature-conquering, nature-hating and self-and-world denial,” he wrote. “It can be seen in the behavior of control-obsessed engineers, corporation people selling consumption itself, academic superhumanists and media professionals fixated on political and economic crisis; neurotics working out psychic problems in the realm of power over men or nature, artistic symbol manipulators disgusted by anything organic.”22 The Foreword by George Sessions is a highly insightful essay that serves an introduction to Paul Shepard’s work The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1998) (New York, NY: Scribners, 1973), pp. ix–xxiii. 20 21 Sessions, p. x. Paul Shepard, “Ecology and Man: A Viewpoint,” in Paul Shepard and Daniel McKinley (eds.), The Subversive Science: Essays towards an Ecology of Man (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1969); reprinted in George Sessions, Deep Ecology for the Twenty-First Century (Boston & London: Shambhala, 1995) pp. 131– 140. Cf. pp. 138–139. 22 A Message fro the Others Rethinking our relationship with the Others is a theme that pervades Paul’s writings. And, it was a concern that held his attention to the very end of his life as “The Message from the Others”, a letter delivered by a bear, so aptly demonstrates. A MESSAGE FROM THE OTHERS23 From The Others by Paul Shepard. Copyright © 1996 by Paul Shepard. Reproduced by permission of Island Press, Washington, DC. “They still do not realize that they need us, thinking that we are simply one more comfort or curiosity. We have not regained the central place in their thought or meaning at the heart of their ecology and philosophy. Too often we are merely physical reality, mindless passion and brutality, or abstract tropes and symbols.” —The Others From: The Forest, The Sea, The Desert, The Prairie Dear Primate P. Shepard and Interested Parties: 23 At noted, this text was included in Paul Shepard, The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, D. C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1996), pp. 331–333. The full text of “The Message to the Others” is also available at: https://paulhoweshepard.wordpress.com/twotexts/. Cf., also https://islandpress.org/book/the-others. We nurtured the humans from a time before they were in the present form. When we first drew around them they were, like all animals, secure in a modest niche. Their evident peculiarities were clearly higher primate in their obsession, social status, and personal identity. In that respect they had grown smart, subtle, and devious, committed to a syndrome of tumultuous, a seasonal, erotic, hierarchic power. Like their nearest kin, they had elevated a certain kind of attention to a remarkable acuity which made them caring, protective, mean, and nasty in the peculiar combination of squinched facial feature and general pettiness of monkeys. In ancient savannas we slowly teased them out of their chauvinism. In our plumage we gave them aesthetics. In our courtships we tutored them in dance. In the gestures of antlered heads we showed them ceremony and the power of the mask. In our running hooves we revealed the secret of grain. As meat we courted them from within. As foragers, their glance shifted a little from corms and rootlets, from the incessant bickering and scuffling of their inherited social introversion. They began looking at the horizon, where some of us were both danger and greater substance. At first it was just a nudge—food stolen from the residue of lion kills, contended for with jackals and vultures, the search for hidden newborn gazelles, slow turtles, and eggs. We gradually became for them objects of thought, of remembering, telling, planning, and puzzling us out as the mystery of energy itself. We tutored them from the outside. Dancing us, they began to see in us performances of their ideas and feelings. We became the concreteness of their own secret selves. We ate them and were eaten by them and so taught them the first metaphor of their frantic sociality: the outerness of themselves, and ourselves as their inwardness. As a bequest of protein we broke the incessant round of herbivorous munching, giving them leisure. This made possible the lithe repose of apprentice predation and a new meaning for rumination, freeing them from the drudgery of browsing and the grip of relentless interpersonal strife. Bringing them into omnivorousness, we transformed them forever and they entered the game as a different player. Not that they abandoned their appetite for greens and fruits, but enlarged it to seeds and meat, and to the risky landscapes of the mind. The savanna or tundra was essential to this tutorial, as a spaciousness open to infinite strategies of pursuit and escape, stretching the senses to their most distant reference. Their thought was invited to a new kind of executorship, incorporating remembrance and planning, to parallels between themselves and the Others and to words—our names—that enabled them to share images and ideas. Having been committed in this way, first as food and then as the imagery of a great variety of events and processes, from signs in dreams to symbols in metaphysics, we have accompanied humans ever since. Having made them human, we continue to do so individually, and now serve more and more in therapeutic ways, holding their hands, so to speak, as they kill our wildness. As slaves we stay close. As something to “pet” and to speak to, someone to be there and need them, to be their first lesson in otherness, we have shared their homes for ten thousand years. They have made that tie a bond. From the private home we have gone out to the wounded and lonely, to those yearning for unqualified devotion—to hospitals, hospices, homes for the aged, wards of the sick, the enclaves of the handicapped and retarded. We now elicit speech from the autistic and trust from those in prison. All that is well enough, but it involves only our minimal, domesticated selves, not our wild and perfect forms. It smells of dependency. They still do not realize that they need us, thinking that we are simply one more comfort or curiosity. We have not regained the central place in their thought or meaning at the heart of their ecology and philosophy. Too often we are merely physical reality, mindless passion and brutality, or abstract tropes and symbols. Sometimes we have to be underhanded. We slip into their dreams, we hide in the language, disguised in allusion, we mask our philosophical role in “nature aesthetics,” we cavort to entertain. We wait in children’s books, in pretty pictures, as burlesques in cartoons, as toys, designs in the very wallpaper, as rudimentary companion or pets. We are marginalized, trivialized. We have sunk to being objects, commodities, possessions. We remain meat and hides, but only as a due and not as sacred gifts. They have forgotten how to learn the future from us, to follow our example, to heal themselves with our tissues and organs, forgotten that just watching our wild selves can be healing. Once we were the bridges, exemplars of change, mediators with the future and the unseen. Their own numbers leave little room for us, and in this is their great misunderstanding. They are wrong about our departure, thinking it to be a part of their progress instead of their emptying. When we have gone they will not know who they are. Supposing themselves to be the purpose of it all, purpose will elude them. Their world will fade into an endless dusk with no whippoorwill to call the owl in the evening and no thrush to make a dawn. –The Others Paul’s fas i atio with ears Paul’s fascination with bears and his meditations on them as well as our conversations about the role of bears in times past in Europe eventually led me to conclude that the imprint of bears on European languages and culture is profound. Moreover, there is ample evidence at this stage that Europeans once believed they themselves descended from bears, a belief that is reflected in a myriad of ritual practices that have survived to the present day, albeit in a modified form, and which date back many millennia to a time before the arrival of agriculturalists.24 While this ursine genealogy unquestionably has its roots in a huntergatherer mentality, what is most remarkable is the resilience of the belief system itself, the way that it has managed to survive, often fragmented and not clearly perceived by the hundreds of performers who dress up each year as bears in villages all across Europe, performers whose existence is immortalized in the photographs taken by Charles Fréger and published in his best-selling book called Wilder Mann: The Image of the Savage (2012). In short, we now know that bear ceremonialism or the so-called “bear cult” associated with foragers dwelling in the northern extremes of Eurasia and North America also had its counterpart in Europe; that it originated there at a point in time when the climate was much Cf. Roslyn M. Frank, “Recovering European ritual bear hunts: A comparative study of Basque and Sardinian ursine carnival performances.” Insula:Quaderno di Cultura Sarda (Cagliari, Sardinia) 3 (2008): 41–97; "Evidence in Favor of the Palaeolithic Continuity Refugium Theory (PCRT): Hamalau and its linguistic and cultural relatives. Part 1.” Insula (Cagliari, Sardinia) 4 (2008): 91–131; "Evidence in Favor of the Palaeolithic Continuity Refugium Theory (PCRT): Hamalau and its linguistic and cultural relatives. Part 2.” Insula: Quaderno di Cultura Sarda (Cagliari, Sardinia) 5 (2009): 89–133; “Bear Ceremonialism in relation to three ritual healers: The Basque salutariyua, the French marcou and the Italian maramao,” in Enrico Comba & Daniele Ormezzano (eds.), Uomini e Orsi: Morfologia del Selvaggio (Torino: Accedemia University Press), pp. 41–122. These four publications are available online in one file at: www.tinyurl.com/hamalau14. Cf. also Roslyn M. Frank, “ Hunting the European Sky Bears: German ‘Strawbears’ and their relatives as transformers.” In Michael and Barbara Rappenglück (eds.), Symbole der Wandlung - Wandel der Symbole. Proceedings of the Gesellschaft für wissenschaftliche Symbolforschung / Society for the Scientific Study of Symbols. May 21–23, 2004, Kassel, Germany (Munich, 2008), pp. 141– 166; available for download at www.tinyurl.com/strawbears. 24 cooler and when there were probably far more bears than humans moving from berry patch to berry patch and one salmon stream to the next. And that, as Paul has observed, it is highly likely that humans followed in the footsteps of bears, walking along paths laid down by generations of these remarkable creatures as they moved through the wilderness in search of sustenance; that humans were avid students who learned many of their lessons on survival from their bear ancestors. Paul’s U pu lished Essay o the Bear (bear essay) Paul Shepard (1995) [an unpublished manuscript] What is popularly called "The Cult of the Bear" varies so much in its details around the northern hemisphere that only the broadest definitions are possible. The most noteworthy survey on a worldwide basis is now seventy years old, and therefore lacks the perspective and insights that recent scholarship makes possible. For example, that monograph—Irving Hallowell's well-known, ethnographic paper—says nothing of the myths that inform the practices which he describes, the archaeological evidence of its earlier expressions, the correlative body of visual art, or the linguistic materials that might further illuminate the evidence, all of which are now more available than in Hallowell's time.25 The two features which appear to be most central to this enormous cultural mosaic are ceremonies associated with the killing of the bear and stories of the intermarriage of bears and people. If their universality is a measure of antiquity, then it may imply that other aspects of respect, worship or reverence for the bear grew around them, like mother of pearl around the seed, becoming slightly different in the regions and continents of the northern world, influencing one another as people and ideas migrated. The history of these two principal features would be greatly aided by a geographic collation, aided by the various disciplines referred to above, which might indicate the area or time of origin of an Ur Bear Cult and associating the ethnography and cosmology of the bear more exactly with Paleolithic parietal art. If indeed the ceremony and the story represent the core of the cultural bear complex, and are continuous with late Pleistocene customs, then past climate 25 Hallowell, A. I., 1926. "Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere," American Anthropologist (n.s.) 28: 1–175. and glaciation would be strong constraints on their birthplace and the migration of associated ideas. With the wider publication of good field observation based on ethological principles, application of radio-tracking, and the use of immobilizing drugs which allow bears to be handled with relative ease, there is a much richer understanding of the biology of bears, which is the natural provenance for major features of bear myth and ceremonialism. The natural history of bears suggests that the cultural practices arose as metaphors based on observations of the bear itself. The logic of these “metaphoric enactments” or rites and stories that personify bears depends on what might be called primal epistemology. It is evident that the bear material, while uniquely emphatic, is consistent with a larger attitude toward all animals. At its heart is the belief that the natural world is rich in signs which are significant to humans, models of exemplary events and keys to the meaning of a complex world, a distancing perspective and analogical way of thinking accompanying the evolution of human self-consciousness and the mental capacity to create a world view. Belief in the natural world as a system of cues and signs is characteristic today of many tribal peoples. It produces a structure of attention in which natural forms are observed not only for practical reasons but because they are perceived as intelligent and spiritual fellow beings. Such a cosmos is itself alive and watchful with a thousand eyes and ears, alert to what the humans do and say. On the one hand the world is a feast for the human mind, and at the same time consciously attends to the human uses of itself. Numerous authors have commented on how difficult it is for us humans, who are heirs of centuries of disbelief in the tutorial genius of the natural world, or who think of the animals as passive, mindless and insentient, to understand the acute sensibility of our hunting/gathering ancestors or recent peoples with a radically different metaphysics, who experience the world as a multifold, living presence.26 Nonetheless, it is possible that humans have long believed that the bear's own experience is more like our own than is that of any other animal. This assumption is commonly held to have its genesis in the bear's similarity to ourselves: its large size, head shape and eye position, bi-pedal stance, lack of a significant tail, nursing positions and manual dexterity. At least as important as the physical traits, however, is the bear's characteristic demeanor, the deliberate movements of head and body which suggest to us a life of the mind, of memory and foresight, deliberation and purpose based on some kind of inner model of the world. This impression is strengthened by the closeness of the bear's niche and ours: that of a large omnivore. Food habits dictate the pace and scope of its life, geared to the annual cycle of the weather, vegetation, migration of fishes or dispersal and numbers of other animal prey. Even in its daily patterns, its periodic foraging alternates with rest and play, and its social behaviours are suggestive in ways that we find reminiscent 26 Nelson, R., 1983, "The Watchful World," Make Prayers to the Raven, University of Chicago Press. of our own lives. In effect, the bear's likeness to humans in body-form, size, gestures, postures, intentional movements and personality reveal temperament and character by dint of which its ecology is linked, much as our own, to seasonal patterns and spatial distribution of resources. These similarities are the keys to its power as an exemplar. Such qualities seem to be contrapuntal to all those mammalian traits in which the bear is different from us. Thus, bears reflect ourselves in the strange mirror of likeness salted with a difference.27 Analogy invites the imagination in all of its forms—dreams, visions, ecstatic trances and the logical rumination of the sort described by Claude Levi-Strauss in speaking of tribal peoples as astute thinkers and logicians.28 Metonym, contact and contiguity—the presence of bears in daily life, the uses of its skin, fat, flesh, bones and organs bring it close. Closeness is also kinship. The metaphor of the bear's interpenetration with human life is the poetic myth of genealogical descent. This is the context from which emerges the nearly universal bear mother story—that of the woman who, when the world was young, married a bear, a union from which “we” are descended.29 Human menses and motherhood are culturally articulated with this bear-ing. In the Haida carvings and other representations around the northern world of the bear mother, we see the melded image of the bear and the human form, a binary figure signifying a reverence for an ancestor whose family “we humans” married into at the beginning of the world, with the result that we and bears have important similarities and that the bearish part is a special wisdom. The hibernation of this large, thoughtful omnivore, is, however, the ultimate exclamation point; it is that break and juncture in the temporal flow of life that epitomizes transformation. Bears entered dens as we now go into our own structures and tombs for sleep and rebirth. In their dens, some bears give birth, nurture the young and take them into the world as if their emergence in the Spring were a second emergence from the womb of Mother Earth, returning with them into the earth a second and again a third winter before separating from them, as though enacting a series of graded transitions and initiations. The inconspicuous sexuality of bears and delayed implantation, resulting in the postponed gestation and development of the fertilized ovum, phenomenologically conflate to "virgin birth." Entering the earth and a death-like state without an apparent mate, coming forth renewed, bringing newborn, may be the master paradigm upon which many human customs and rituals signify transition and permutation in the care of a maternal divinity. The ceremonies of health and renewal, war and peace, death and rebirth, inauguration, initiation, and the grades of elderhood often utilize an ursine object—a bear skin, tooth or paw—as a talisman. Outstanding among these are the funerary traditions of burial, 27 Shepard, Paul, and Sanders, Barry, 1985, The Sacred Paw, the Bear in Nature, Myth and Literature, The Viking Press, New York. 28 Levi-Strauss, Claude, 1966, The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press. 29 Barbeau, Marius, 1945, "Bear Mother," Journal of Folklore 59: 231. beginning with Neanderthal peoples, who had long experience with both brown and cave bears (Ursus spelaeus).30 The burial of bear bones by people and the study of the objects placed in human graves may yet make it possible to ascertain whether the underground passage of the bear was taken as a guide to funerary formalities and the associated expectation of life after death.31 The bear's comatose hiegera in the underworld is perhaps one of the most intellectually stimulating observations of the natural world made by human-kind. In death the bear is recusant. By a kind of subterranean self-immolation, making a passage in the “underworld”, this divinity redefines ends as new beginnings. And it remains only for the logic of the metaphoric imagination for the bear to appear in the heavens and therefore for it to occupy all three levels of the cosmos: earth, sky, and underworld. Naturalistically speaking, the sidereal bear is the most improbable. As people as widely separated as the Ainu and the Lapps avow, the bear is the spirit of high places, of the mountain; it is also a tree climber with sacred connections to birches, alders and cedars, hence with possible connections to the symbol of the Tree of Life. Yet, we cannot assume that a “leap into the sky” follows merely from the bear's likeness for hills and trees, as though a mythic celestial equivalent of the earthly world was self-evident. Something quite different is involved, in which the animated multitude of the zodiac, wheeling across the nightly sky in keeping with the singular power of Ursa Major, is a true reflection of the secret of life on earth. The motion of the stellar hemisphere, which to later, agricultural civilizations suggested grindstones and other wheels, turned by some invisible hand, may have been very differently interpreted by earlier peoples, as the heavenly, unitary spectacle of the dynamic process or energy system that animates life itself, of which in diurnal experience we see only fragments. The nightly chase across the sky, in which the bear is said by some peoples to be the prey and other the predator, constitutes in either case a kind of trophic metaphysics. The “animal combat” motif, so widely known from Siberian archaeology, may be an erroneous interpretation or a distortion of the food-web concept, in which our politically centralized, competitive cultures misconstrue predation as a symbol of struggles for power, while instead it actually stylizes the synergistic flow patterns of energy and life as food.32 Unlike the panther gnawing the elk, the bear is not only framed in a carnivorous context, and is therefore a more amiable guide to that which is perspicacious in the old metaphysics. Even so, it may also have been a vehicle of the anthropomorphism of the sacred. For example, the Vinca figures from sixth millennium B.C Romania, part bear and part woman, may depict a stage in the dissociation of human kinship with the bear on the 30 Kurten, Bjorn, 1971, The Cave Bear Story; Columbia University Press, New York. 31 Solecki, Ralph S., 1972, Shanidar: the Humanity of Neanderthal Man, Allan Lane, London. 32 Esther Jacobson, Esther, 1993, The Deer Goddess of Ancient Siberia, E.J. Brill, Leiden. advent of early humanism.33 In contrast to the bear-mother stories of Eurasian and American folklore, combining the figures of bear and human in celebration of unity with the animal, the binary figure of bear and woman in such Neolithic objects may represent a stage in the emergence of the humanized deities from animal form and the human control of animal powers.34 The decline of the bear as a holy animal and its replacement in folklore by heroic bear-sons may historically represent the ideology of the “defeat” of nature by humankind. In this sense, the widespread custom of speaking of the bear only in euphemisms may have referred not only to respect for it but the sense of being surrounded by the eyes and ears of visible and invisible beings, an attitude and resulting courtesy no longer practiced in our secular and materialistic vision of the world. The "cult of the sacred bear" seems to be much larger than a local theriophany, indeed, to be a complex, multiform, ancient metaphysics. Its analysis requires information from many different disciplines, the study of the cosmic or sacred bear calling for a high degree of syncretic thought. There are at least four major themes which further, cooperative study might explicate. These are:  I. Spontaneously perceived as a half-human divinity, the bear is the forerunner of the anthropomorphic concept of deity. Early expressions of this are the therianthropic story of the woman who marries a bear and of the heroic ventures of her sons.  II. The universal trophonos (in the Greek myth of resurrection after death, Trophionios), in which the bear is the bearer of delectable, life-giving meats for humans, signifying all food as the substantial aspect of world energy; which turns the celestial vault and the seasons which it controls.  III. The bear is the archetype of the chthonic deity. The idea of life underground, a Netherworld, and its relationship to renewed life presumably arises in existential phenomenology. Of all the underworld denizens, from seeds to snakes, the bear is the model of the willing and conscious participant in palingenesis.  IV. The gatekeeper and passage-maker, as in Franco-Cantabrian Paleolithic cave art, the bear image seems to mark the entrances and the corridors between galleries.35 Transitions are its forte, including the connections between the lower worlds and the heavens, as well as magistrate of personal and social stages in human society. References: 33 Gimbutas, Marija, 1982, The Goddesses and the Gods of Old Europe, University of California, Berkeley. 34 Bullfinch, Thomas, 1973, "Callisto," in Bullfinch's Mythology, MacMillan, New York. 35 Andre Leroy Gourhan, Treasures of Prehistoric Art, Abrams, New York, 1967. Alekseyenko, Ye. A. "Kul't medvedya u ketov," Sovetskaya etnografiya 4: 90–104, 1960. Anisimov, A. F. "Cosmological Concepts of the Peoples of the North," in Harry N. Michael, ed., Studies in Siberian Shamanism, Toronto: Arctic Institute of North America, pp. 85–123, 1963. Bachofen, J. J. Der Bär in den Religionen des Alterthums, Basel, 1963. Barbeau, Marius, "Bear Mother," Journal of American Folklore 59: 231, 1946. Bullfinch, Thomas,"Callisto," in Bullfinch's Mythology, MacMillan, New York, 1973. Dioszegi, V. Popular Beliefs and Folklore Tradition in Siberia, Indiana Univ., 1968. Dyrenkova, N. P., "Bear Worship Among the Turkish Tribes of Siberia," Proc. 23rd Int. Congress of Americanists, 1928. New York, 1930, pp. 441–440. Gimbutas, Marija, The Goddesses and the Gods of Old Europe, Univ. of California, Berkeley, 1982. Gourhan, Andre Leroy, Treasures of Prehistoric Art, Abrams, New York, 1967. Hallowell, A. I., "Bear Ceremonialism in the Northern Hemisphere," American Anthropologist (n.s.) 28: 1– 175, 1926. Jacobson, Esther, The Deer Goddesses of Ancient Siberia, E. Brill, New York, 1993. Kalman, B. "Two Purification Rites in the Bear Cult of the Ob-Ugrians," in Dioszegi, op. cit., pp. 85–92. Kurten, Bjorn, The Cave Bear Story, Columbia University Press, New York, 1975. Levi-Strauss, Claude, The Savage Mind, University of Chicago Press, 1966. MacCullock, John Arnott, ed., The Mythology of all Races, Cooper Square Publications, New York, 1964. MacKenzie, Donald A., The Migration of Symbols and their Relation to Beliefs and Customs, Knopf, New York, 1926. Nelson, R., "The Watchful World," Make Prayers to the Raven: A Koyukon View of the Northern Forest, University of Chicago Press, pp. 14–32. 1983. Rockwell, David, Giving Voice to Bear: North American Indian Myths, Rituals and Images of the Bear, Roberts Rinehart, Niwot, Colorado, 1991. Shepard, Paul, Shepard, Paul, and Sanders, Barry, The Sacred Paw, the Bear in Nature, Myth and Literature, The Viking Press, New York, 1985. Solecki, Ralph S., Shanidar: The Humanity of Neanderthal Man, Allan Lane, 1972. Vasilevich, G. M. "O kul'tc medvedya u evenkov," Sbornik Muzeya antropologii i etnografii: XXVII: 151– 169, 1971. Publications of Paul Shepard36 Books Where We Belong by Paul Shepard, Florence R. Shepard (ed.) with an Introduction by Kenneth Helphand (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2003). Encounters with Nature: Essays by Paul Shepard, Florence R. Shepard (ed.) with an Introduction by David Petersen (Washington, D.C: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1999). Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Florence R. Shepard (ed.) (Washington D.C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1998). Nature and Madness, with a Foreword by C.L. Rawlins (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1998) (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1982). 36 Cf. https://paulhoweshepard.wordpress.com/books/. Thinking Animals: Animals and the Development of Human Intelligence, with a Foreword by Max Oelschlaeger (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1998) (New York: The Viking Press, 1978) The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game with a Foreword by George Sessions (Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 1998) (NYC, NY: Scribners, 1973). Traces of an Omnivore, with an Introduction by Jack Turner (Washington, D. C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1996). The Only World We’ve Got: A Paul Shepard Reader (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1996). The Others: How Animals Made Us Human (Washington, D. C.: Island Press/Shearwater Books, 1996). Man in the Landscape: An Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature (Athens, GA: University of Georgia Press, 2002) (College Station, TX: Texas A & M University Press, 1991) (NYC, NY: Knopf, 1967). The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature (with Barry Sanders) (NYC, NY: The Viking Press, 1985) (New York: Arcana Books, Penguin, 1992). Environ/mental: Essays on the Planet as Home (with Daniel McKinley) (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1971). The Subversive Science: Essays Toward an Ecology of Man (with Daniel McKinley) (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1969). Monograph English Reaction to the New Zealand Landscape Before 1850, Pacific Viewpoint Monograph No. 4 (Wellington, New Zealand: Victoria University of Wellington, 1969). Introductions to Books, Interviews, and Chapters in Anthologies “Paul Shepard” (interview) Listening to the Land: Conversations About Nature, Culture, and Eros, Derrick Jensen (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1995). “Nature and Madness,” (editors’ excerpts from Nature and Madness) Ecopsychology, Theodore Roszak, Mary E. Gomes, and Allen D. Kanner (eds.) (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1995). “Virtually Hunting Reality in the Forests of Simulacra,”(essay) Reinventing Nature? Responses to Postmodern Deconstruction, Michael E. Soule and Gary Lease (eds.) (Washington, D. C.: Island Press, 1995). “The Unreturning Arrow,” (interview) Talking on the Water, Conversations About Nature and Creativity, ed. Jonathan White (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1994). “On Animal Friends,” (essay) The Biophilia Hypothesis, Stephen R. and Edward O. Wilson (eds.) (Washington, D.C.: Island Press, 1993). “A Post-Historic Primitivism,” (essay) The Wilderness Condition, Essays on Environment and Civilization, Max Oelschlaeger (ed.) (San Francisco, CA: Sierra Club Books, 1992). “From Nature and Madness,” (excerpt from Nature and Madness) Learning to Listen to the Land, Bill Willers (ed.) (Washington, D. C.: Island Press, 1991). “Objets Trouves,” (essay) The Meaning of Gardens, Idea, Place, and Action, Mark Francis and Randolph T. Hester, Jr. (eds.) (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1990). “Introduction,” The Ecology of Imagination in Childhood by Edith Cobb, Japanese Edition (Tokyo, Japan: Shishaku-sha Publications, 1986). “Homage to Heidegger,” (essay) Deep Ecology, Michael Tobias (ed.) (San Diego, CA: Avant Books, 1984). “Ecosophy and the Environment,” (essay) Good Reading, 1980 “Sociobiology and Value Systems,” (essay) The Responsibility of the Academic Community in the Search for Absolute Values, Vol. II, Proceeding of the Eighth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (NYC, NY: The International Cultural Foundation Press, 1980). “Introduction,” The Comedy of Survival, In Search of an Environmental Ethic, (Los Angeles, CA: Guild of Tutors Press, 1974, 1980). “The Conflict of Ideology and Ecology,” The Search for Absolute Values in a Changing World, Vol. I, Proceeding of the Sixth International Conference on the Unity of the Sciences (NYC, NY: The International Cultural Foundation Press, 1977). “Nature Study–Indoor Images, Outdoor Reality,” Claremont Reading Conference Forty-first Yearbook, Malcolm P. Douglass, (ed.) (Claremont, CA, 1977. “Introduction,” Meditations on Hunting, Jose Ortega y Gasset, trans. Howard B. Wescott (NYC, NY: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1972) (1985 Revistas de Occidente S/A). “Ecology and Man–A Viewpoint,”(essay from The Subversive Science) The Everlasting Universe, Readings on the Ecological Revolution, ed. Lorne J. Forstner and John H. Todd (Lexington, MA: D. C. Heath and Company, 1971). “Ecology and Man–A Viewpoint,” (essay from The Subversive Science) It’s Not Too Late, Fred Carvell and Max Tadlock (eds.) (Beverly Hills, CA: Glencoe Press, 1971). “Ecology and Man–A Viewpoint,” (essay from The Subversive Science) The Ecological Conscience, Values for Survival, ed. Robert Disch (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, Inc., 1970). “Ecology” (essay) Prophecy for the Year 2000, Irving A. Falk (ed.) (NYC, NY: Julian Messner, 1970). “The Virtues of Anonymity,” (essay) A Reading Approach to College Writing, Martha Heasley Cox (ed.) (San Francisco, CA: Chandler Publishing Company, 1967). “The Eyes Have It,” (essay) This Is Nature, Thirty Years of the Best from Nature Magazine, selected and edited by Richard W. Westwood (NYC, NY: Thomas Y. Crowell Company, 1959). Essays 1990s “The Origin of Metaphor: The Animal Connection,” The Touchstone Center Journal (1997): 7–17. “Are Pets a Healthy Link with Nature?” The CQ Researcher 6 (48) (Dec. 27, 1996: 1145. “Wilderness is Where My Genome Lives,” Whole Terrain 4 (1995/1996): 12–16. “Gaia Doubts,” American Nature Writing Newsletter (Spring 1994): 11. “The Biological Bases of Bear Mythology and Ceremonialism,” Bears of Russian and Adjacent Countries — State of Populations, Proceedings of the 6th Conference of Specialist Studying Bears, Central Forest Reserve, TverOblast, Russia 2 (September 6-11, 1993): 126–130. “Digging for our Roots,” Places 6(4) (Summer 1990): 68–81. “Searching Out Kindred Spirits,” Parabola, The Magazine of Myth and Tradition, XVI (2) (May 1991): 86– 87. 1980s “The Philosopher, The Naturalist and the Agony of the Planet,” The Human/Animal Connection, The Carnivore, Volume VIII, Part I, Sierra Nevada College Press 1 (1985): 84–89. “Celebrations of the Bear,” The North American Review 270 (3) (September 1985): 17–25. “The Ark of the Mind,” Parabola, Myth and the Quest for Meaning VII(2)( May 1983): 54–59. “On Madness and Nature,” Participant, The Pitzer College Magazine (Spring 1982): 9. “Five Green Thoughts,” The Massachusetts XXI(2)(Summer 1980): 273–288. “Not Quite Fatal,” Pamphlet published by the Canadian Society for Social Responsibility in Science (1980). 1970s “Itinerant Thoughts on Place,” Participant, The Pitzer College Magazine (Fall 1977): 3–9. “Place in American Culture,” The North American Review (Fall 1977): 22–32. “The Teacher as a Traveling Student,” Participant, The Pitzer College Magazine (1977): 16. “Ugly is Better,” The Pitzer Participant (Winter 1975): 10–14. “La ecología y el hombre.” Revista de Occidente, Ecología y Uranismo (143 y 144) (Febrero-Marzo)(1975): 201–215. “Place and Human Development,” Children, Nature, and the Urban Environment, Proceeding of a Symposium Fair (19-23 May 1975): 7–12. “Animal Rights and Human Rites,” The North American Review 259 (4) (Winter 1974): 35–42. “Hunting for a Better Ecology,” The North American Review 258 (2) (Summer 1973): 12–15. “Establishment and Radicals on the Environmental Crisis,” Ecology, 87–70. “Human Ecology: Evolution and Development,” The New Natural Philosophy, International College (1970): 19. 1960s “On Not Being Seduced by Capricious Costumery (Introduction to an essay by J. B. Jackson in The Subversive Science) Landscape (1969): 204. “Whatever Happened to Human Ecology?” BioScience 17 (12) (December 1967): 891–894. “The Virtues of Anonymity,” Science Review (September 17, 1966): 77. “The Wilderness as Nature,” The Atlantic Naturalist (January, 1965): 9–14 “The Corvidean Millennium; or Letter From an Old Crow,” Perspectives in Biology and Medicine VII (3) (Spring 964): 331–342. “The Arboreal Eye,” School, Science, and Mathematics (December, 1964): 736–740. “Aggression and the Hunt, The Tender Carnivore,” Landscape (Autumn 1964): 12–15. “The Artist as Explorer, a Review by Paul Shepard, Landscape 12 (2) (Winter 1962-1963): 25–27. “The Cross Valley Syndrome,” Landscape 10 (3) (Spring, 1961): 4–8. “English Landscape Esthetics in the Settlement of New Zealand,” Proceedings: AAAS Tenth Pacific Science Congress, The Role of Cultural Values in Land Use (August 31, 1961). 1950s “A Theory of the Value of Hunting,” Transactions of the Twenty-fourth North American Wildlife Conference (March, 1959): 504–512. “Biological Perspective on the Broad Scale Use of Chemical Pesticides,” Massachusetts Audubon XLIII (4) (1959): 165–167. “Reverence for Life at Lambarene, Landscape (Winter 1958-1959): 26–29. “The Place of Nature in Man’s World,” School Science and Mathematics (May, 1958): 394–403. “The Place of Nature in Man’s World,” Atlantic Naturalist (April, 1958): 85–89. “Paintings of the New England Landscape,” College Art Journal XVII(1) (1957): 30–42. “Dead Cities in the American West,” Landscape 6(2) (1956): 25–28. “The Nature of Tourism,” Landscape (Summer 1955): 29–33. “Montana’s Marching Mountains,” Nature Magazine (February 1954): 97–99. “Something Amiss in the National Parks,” National Parks Magazine (October-December 1953): 150–151, 187–190. “They Painted What They Saw,” Landscape 3 (1) (Summer 1953): 6–11. “Watching Wildlife at Crater Lake,” Audubon Magazine (November, 1952): 383–387. “Experiment in Learning,” American Forests (October, 1952). “Can the Cahow Survive?” Natural History (September, 1952): 303–305. “The Dove is Doubtful Game,” Nature Magazine (August-September, 1952): 351–352. “Yale Conservation Club Sponsors A Series of Panels,” Connecticut Woodlands, XVII (1) (March 1952): 9– 10. “Our Highways and Wildlife,” Nature Magazine (January 1952): 34–37. “Eyes–Clues to Life Habits,” Nature Magazine (1951): 457–460. “The Sportsman’s Dilemma,” The Land: Notes Afield X (2) (Summer, 1951): 168–171. Paul Shepard’s archives are housed at Sterling Library, Yale University, New Haven, CT 06520-8240