A compilation of the author's works reflects his philosophy of the relationship between the human condition and the surrounding natural environment
Collects in one volume the writings of a man considered to be an elder of the environmental movement. The essays range from human ecology to environmental perception, from the nature of sanity to our relationships with our fellow animals. No index. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.
Philosopher and essayist Paul Shepard (1925 1996) brought to the environmental literature of the 1960s and ’70s the political passion of the time, but a passion matched with a demand for scholarly precision. This anthology from his work, which Shepard himself assembled not long before his death, addresses themes touched on in many of his books. Many of these themes deal in one way or another with the disastrous consequences of humankind’s increasing detachment from the natural world as a by-product of ?the ecological insolence of the last century.”
In Shepard’s view, the natural world and particularly the world of animals is the source of human intelligence and the wellspring of the imagination. He examines, for instance, the antiquity of the human eye, an organ essential to the cognitive revolution that distinguishes us from other primates; the origins of language and literature in the imitation of birdsong; and the lessons animals of many species can teach us about ourselves. Shepard delves into environmental psychology, anatomy, history, linguistics, and a host of other topics to make his strikingly original arguments, which have helped shape modern environmental thinking and influenced the writings of such successors as Barry Lopez and Terry Tempest Williams.
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.
