LITMIR.BIZ

      Paul at age two in Kansas City, Michigan, 1927. Family snapshot. Courtesy of Flo She.

      “In the ideology of farming,” he offers, “wild things are enemies of the tame: the wild Other is not the context but the opponent of ‘my’ domain. Impulses, fears, and dreams—the realm of the unconscious—no longer are represented by the community of wild things with which I can work out a meaningful relationship. The unconscious is driven deeper and away with the wilderness. New definitions of the self by trade and political subordination in part replace the metaphoric reciprocity between natural and cultural in the totemic life of the hunter-foragers. But the new system defines by exclusion. What had been a complementary entity embracing friendly and dangerous parts of a unified cosmos now take on the colors of hostility and fragmentation.”

      The unconscious is driven deeper and away with the wilderness! That phrase alone laid the ground for all of my subsequent thinking.

      Son of the Midwest, Paul Shepard was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1925. His father was Paul Howe Shepard, a horticulturist; his mother, Clara Louise Grigsby. When he was nine, the family moved to Mountain Grove, where his father had been appointed director of the Fruit Experiment Station of the state of Missouri. Paul’s future interests already etched into his being, he wrote a weekly newsletter reporting the unfolding of the plant world at the station, and this he delivered to the people of Mountain Grove via a cart drawn by the family dog. With his father he also learned to hunt. He soon had meetings with his remarkable people: zoologist Rudolph Bennit, a biologist whose specialty was the life cycle of the bobwhite quail; and Ernest Thompson Seton, originator of the Woodcraft Indians and a founding father of the Boy Scouts, who ran a camp in New Mexico where Paul learned woodsman skills.

      He went on to study journalism at Northwestern University; gunning, artillery, and radio through the army’s specialized training programs; English literature and wildlife conservation at the University of Missouri; ornithology at Cornell; and he received a Ph.D. at Yale in an interdisciplinary program combining conservation, landscape architecture, and art history.

      What lay ahead was a plethora of teaching jobs, grants and studies, hikes and hunts, fellowships—and books. There was no lack of preparation for or imagination expressed in the books that he then banged out on his portable typing machine: The Sacred Paw, about the special relationship of humans to bears came out in 1985, followed by The Only World We’ve Got, The Others: Animals and Human Being, Traces of an Omnivore, The Eclectic Primitive, and Coming Home to the Pleistocene.

      When I realized that the same man with the flurry of papers that blew into the Smith biology lab in 1966 was the savvy leader of an animal totem workshop at CIIS, I wrote him a letter. Perhaps the only way he would remember me was through a rather unfortunate event that had taken place lo these many years ago. He had scrawled “METABOLISM,” “CATABOLISM,” and “ANABOLISM” on the blackboard and then asked what these words meant. As a card-carrying introvert, I have never been one to speak up in class, but in this case I immediately saw that I had a leg up on everybody else: I had learned these very same concepts from my high-school biology teacher who wore a sari, boasted a red spot on her forehead, and was from India. Mrs. Banerjee also pronounced the words—and thus taught them—with an accent on the first syllable (instead of the second). Met-a-bolism. Cat-a-bolism. An-a-bolism. Yes, I became the laughing stock of Bi-oh-logy 101 as I pompously enunciated the words aloud as if I myself hailed from the subcontinent. Now, in my letter, the association of that devastating faux pas was good enough for identification—and thanks to Paul’s innate kindheartedness, a correspondence began.

      He took delight in my memory of the field trip whose purpose, he reminisced, had been to present the question of randomness versus order in nature; all I could think of upon reading his note was the miraculous randomness—or order—in my finding him twenty-five years later. We exchanged letters, sharing books, articles in print, articles under construction, and colleagues. I finally invited him to become what at The Tao of Physics Fritjof Capra’s think tank the Elmwood Institute was called a Peer, a position that resembled a Fellow. He offered quotes by others to explain his instinct to bow out: “I suppose I am somewhat like my friend, Ivan Illich,” he wrote. “Illich says, in effect, ‘I have spent my life trying to ask the right questions. As for solving the problems they bear on, it will take all the efforts of highly specialized experts of many different kinds—all beyond my ability.’” He also quoted Edward Abbey, who argued that he might make the right changes in his own life but was not a leader in social action.

      In 1993 I received Paul’s alarming “Dear Friends” note requesting support, or at least cognizance, regarding the book he had written on his favorite topic: The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth, and Literature. As he explained the problem, he had originally conceived of it with his Viking Press editor, and he had written all the chapters on the mythic bear, constellations, archaeology, paleontology, linguistic materials, festivals, rites, and ceremonies of tribal peoples, etc.—while his coauthor had contributed but one chapter, on the bear in literature. “This book,” Paul explained, “is part of a lifelong study of animals in culture.” His current devastation stemmed from the fact that this coauthor had been proclaiming that it was he who had written the bulk of The Sacred Paw, and he had actually sold five chapters to another publisher for an anthology, each of which he had rewritten paraphrasing Paul’s sources to ensure escape from copyright litigation.

      An even more alarming occurrence was Paul’s death by lung cancer in 1996. Thankfully, just the year before, I and others had had the opportunity to heap praise upon him in ecologist Max Oelschlaeger’s Festschrift The Company of Others: Essays in Celebration of Paul Shepard. “The most important thing I can say is [his books] gave the rest of us courage—courage to say what we are saying in our own books,” wrote historian Calvin Luther Martin. “I owe everything to Paul Shepard,” contributed deep ecologist Dolores La Chapelle.

      “Paul was the only college teacher I ever knew to take the class into the wilds,” I noted, “all the while seeding our minds with dangerously holistic notions like ecology. Years later, Nature and Madness changed my work and days…. [Lewis] Mumford’s brilliance carved a crystalline picture of what is wrong with mass technological civilization and our lives within it. Shepard sanctioned this view, deepened it with rare psycho-historical insight—and then went on to open the door to what could be right. I remember the moment distinctly. I was lying on the couch in

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