|
Paul Howe Shepard, Jr. (b. 1926, d. 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. 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. He died of lung cancer on July 21, 1996 in Salt Lake City. 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.
|
