Everything about Paul Shepard totally explained
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.
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 neotony, 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.
Further Information
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