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American Philosophy

Throughout his career, Paul Shepard addressed the most fundamental question of life: Who are we? His overarching vision derived from two facts: First, that our genetic heritage, formed by three million years of hunting and gathering, remains essentially unchanged. Shepard argued that this, "our wild Pleistocene genome," influences everything from human neurology and ontogeny to our pathologies, social structure, myths, and cosmology.

Second, contact with animals and nature becomes a necessary ingredient of normal human development, and a basis for individual and environmental maturity.

In THE OTHERS: How Animals Made Us Human, Shepard draws upon the fields of anthropology, evolution, philosophy, and zoology to present a radical reexamination of our relationships to animals.

Shepard considers animals as "others" in a world where otherness of all kinds is in danger and in which otherness is essential to the discovery of our true selves. As he writes, "the human species emerged enacting, dreaming, and thinking animals, and cannot be fully itself without them."

Beginning with the fundamental relationship of eating and being eaten, Shepard considers animal words and concepts in language, folklore, fairy tales, games, poetry, and art. The permutations and symbolic transformations from man to beast in dreams, ritual, literature, and myth are noted as are how hearing and mimicking the natural world gave us our "ear" and influenced our dancing, singing, and music. The use of real and symbolic animal figures in religious imagery is shown to be pivotal to our formation of identity and meaning.

Among his examples from throughout history and cultures, we learn that the Ainu of the Hokkaido island of Japan named their physical ailments after various animals. We contemplate the place of Teddy, Pooh, Paddington, Yogi, and Smokey Bear in popular culture. We consider why we eat "beef" rather than "steer" and "venison" rather than "deer." Shepard also examines contentious issues, such as animal domestication and animal rights, showing a balanced appreciation of them though with a wry wink at some of their arguments.

The OTHERS is a book that will influence our thinking about the natural and animal context of human nature for decades to come, as we come to understand more fully that we need animals and wild nature to be fully human.

TRACES OF AN OMNIVORE finds Shepard exploring topics as varied as aesthetics, hunting, perception, agriculture, history, animal rights and domestication, postmodern Reconstruction, tourism, vegetarianism, and the Hudson River school of painters.

In a series of essays Shepard pays homage to his intellectual mentors: Aldo Leopold; Ortega y Gasset; Marshall McLuhanl Walter Ong, Erik Erikson; Martin Heidegger; Edith Cobb, and Claude Levi-Strauss.

Shepard’s elephantine wit informs the satirical "Letter from an Old Crow," in which a crow describes human nature and the efforts by him and his fellow crows to transform human society, or, as he writes "to give wings, so to speak, to their pedestrian society."

In "Bears and People," Shepard’s sure-handed ability to synthesize information from across intellectual boundaries come through. "The bear lives in our urban hive as a teddy, a family in ‘Goldilocks,’ Smokey, or just an athletic team … Like us, the bear stands upright on the whole foot, eyes nearly in a f frontal plane, so that we look into a true face .… He … sits up like a child or slouches like an adolescent, worries, moans, sighs, courts with demonstrable affection, snores, spanks the offspring, loves sweets, and has a distinct moody, gruff, or morose side."

This volume services as an admirable introduction to this seminal thinker and writer. This collection contains previously unpublished or difficult-to-find writings that serve to further his reputation as one of our most important environmental thinkers and writers.

Until his death in July, 1996, Paul Shepard was Avery Professor of Human Ecology Emeritus at Pitzer College and the Claremont Graduate School.

Shepard’s work in landscape perception and human ecology spanned more than forty years. A native of Missouri and graduate of the University of Missouri, he received his Ph.D. at Yale University where he studied the relationship of ecology and art in American culture. He was a member of the Advisory Board of Landscape and Urban Planning, a National Lecturer for Sigma Xi, a Distinguished Lecturer for the Fulbright Program in India, and a Fellow of the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations.

His books include Thinking Animals: Animals in the Development of Human Intelligence (Viking, 1978); The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth and Literature (Viking Penguin, 1985); and Nature and Madness. In June 1995 his pioneering influence on the field of human ecology was recognized in The Company of Others: Essays in Celebration of Paul Shepard, edited by Max Oelschlaeger (Kivaki Press). In June 1996, Sierra Club Books published a collection of his writings entitled, The Only World We’ve Got: A Paul Shepard Reader.

THE ENVIRONMENTAL IMAGINATION

Thoreau, Nature Writing, and the Formation of American Culture

by Lawrence Buell

Harvard University Press

$35.50, cloth; 586 pages, notes, bibliography, index

0-674-25861-4

paper:

Using the American classic Walden as a touchstone for literary depictions of the meaning of nature in the American mind. Buell puts our current environmental crises into the context of the imaginative encounter of humans and the natural world. As such Buell manages to raise plenty of disturbing questions about the poverty of the literary imagination, as well as, to construct the links that hold together important writers as Crevecoeur, Wendell Berry, John Muir, Aldo Leopold, Mary Austin, Edward Abbey, Rachel Carson, and Leslie Silko. Recurrent themes, such as dreams of abandonment, personification of animals and nature, celebration of natural cycles, devotion to place and seasons, and the foreboding of catastrophe are brought into play in the tradition of imagining nature and human nature against the backdrop of nature.

WALDEN

by Henry David Thoreau

introduction and annotations by Bill McKibben

Beacon Press

$17.00, cloth, 312 pages

0-8070-1418-4

WALDEN is too well known and beloved, even if not thoroughly read to require additional words of cajolery from us. McKibben’s annotations offer better homage and useful orientation to the work. It will make an excellent gift. McKibben’s Age of Missing Information represents a primary challenge to cyberspace development. What would you learn if you taped every channel coming into your TV for 24 hours from your cable system. Then review and compare the 2000 hours of video tape to 24 hours of camping on a mountaintop near a pond. What will each one teach us? Bill McKibben does an excellent job of capturing what the real impact is on our thoughts when we watch television. I was impressed by the questions he raised and feel this is an important book.

THOREAU:

A Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers

Walden

The Maine Woods

Cape Cod

edited and annotated by Robert F. Sayre

The Library of America

$30.00, cloth, 1114 pages, notes on text, chronology, index

0-940450-27-5

This edition by far is the best general edition of WALDEN if for no other reason than it puts

Thoreau’s literary effort into perspective of his other writings.

THE VALUE OF LIFE:

Biological Diversity and Human Society

by Stephen Kellert

Island Press

280 pages figures, tables, index

Cloth: $27.50 ISBN: 1-55963-317-4

Paper: $16.95 ISBN: 1-55963-318-2

One of the more discussed topics these days are values — family values, societal values, and educational values. Few have considered in-depth how our values are an outgrowth of our relation to nature, especially wildlife and its beneficent impact upon our own survival.

Stephen Kellert’s THE VALUE OF LIFE pinpoints the basic values of people’s various needs to associate with nature. Kellert identifies nine basic values as inherent tendencies, integral to being fully human, and considers the large scale loss of species on earth as a threat to our optimal quality of physical, emotional, intellectual, and spiritual well-being. THE VALUE OF LIFE examines the relationships among diverse age, gender, education, socioeconomic, geographic, and ethnic groups as they are in relation to different human-animal activities and in response to varying species among differing cultures.

After delineating these relationships, Kellert analyzes their impact on current ecological problems and applies them to current policy issues, such as the conservation and protection of endangered species and biodiversity.

He argues that humans must not allow issues such as property rights and economic development to supersede their fundamental need to affiliate with nature. Rather, he encourages us to celebrate our dependence on nature and living diversity in the quest to achieve a richer, varied, and more complete existence.

Kellert’s twenty years of research shows that the relationship between humans and nature involves biologically-based, inherent human tendencies, greatly influenced by culture, learning, and experience. Other important titles: The Biophilia Hypothesis, and Ecology, Economics, Ethics : The Broken Circle.

HOW TO IDENTIFY PLANTS

By H.D. Harrington

illustrated by L.W. Durrell

Swallow Press

Ohio University Press

$11.95, paper, 207 pages, illustrations

0-8040-0149-9

HOW TO IDENTIFY GRASSES AND GRASSLIKE PLANTS

By H.D. Harrington

illustrated by Ann Steely, Robin Hause, and Janet Klein

Swallow Press

Ohio University Press

$11.95, paper, 154 pages, illustrations

0-80400746-2

Two classic, illustrated guidebooks to the art and science of plant and grass identification have been republished in new formats by Swallow Press / Ohio University Press.

First issued in 1957 by Swallow Press, HOW TO IDENTIFY PLANTS, by H.D. Harrington, is familiar to a generation of students as a clear and carefully organized reference book. Harrington, who was Professor of Botany and Curator of the Herbarium at Colorado State University, gives step-by-step instructions and definitions to help readers recognize and classify plants. The new printing has been reset and reformatted, and L.W. Durrell's drawings and illustrated glossary—more than 500 images—have been digitally enhanced for clarity.

First published in 1977 by Swallow Press, HOW TO IDENTIFY GRASSES AND GRASSLIKE PLANTS is Harrington's primer on the difficult art of identifying grasses, sedges, and rushes. Having watched the pitfalls of thousands of students as they struggled and learned, Harrington wrote a clear, concise text that has been indispensable in the classroom and the field. Now reset and digitally enhanced, with more than 500 drawings, Harrington's aim of producing a book of "practical assistance" has been realized fully.

MICROCOSMOS
The Invisible World of Insects
Claude Nuridsany & Marie Prennou
Stewart Tabori & Chang
$35.00, 160 pages, 300 full color photographs
1-55670-555-7

A Companion volume to the award-winning full-length feature film MICROCOMOS an official selection at the 1996 Cannes Film Festival, this attractive book offers a rare glimpse into the fascinating world of insects. Though infinitesimal in size it is a universe unto its own with vast frontiers virtually unknown to the naked eye. Through the wonders of macrophotography creators Claude Nuridsany and Marie Perennou reveal the wonders and magic that can be found in our own backyard where a groomed plot of grass is transformed into wild jungle inhabited by spectacular and unusual creatures. Suddenly the minute take on mythic proportions.
Packed with over 90 full-color photographs and cinematic sequences, as well as five insightful chapters and an additional chapter on the creation of the film MICROCOMOS is sure to captivate and delight.

OTHER CREATIONS: Rediscovering the Spirituality of Animals by Christopher Manes

Doubleday

$22.95, hardcover, 240 pages, notes, bibliography, index

0-385-48365-1

Is Mickey Mouse just a modern-day cave painting? Are teddy bears really forgotten objects of religious devotion? What are the similarities between Michael Jordan and a Native American shaman?

Though animistic religions may seem to be an irrelevant quirky phenomenon of our distant primitive past, a quick look at popular culture reveals that this ancient history endures as a vibrant part of the present. Consider cartoon characters such as Mickey Mouse and Bugs Bunny, superheroes Batman and Robin, sports teams such as the Chicago Bulls, the Gund stuffed animal empire, television series such as PBS's Nature, David Letterman's Stupid Pet Tricks, tourist destinations like Sea World, bestselling books like The Hidden Life of Dogs and When Elephants Weep, the megabillion dollar pet industry, and blockbuster Hollywood movies such as The Lion King, Free Billy, and Jurassic Park. An objective observer could justifiably conclude that we remain obsessed with animals.

In OTHER CREATIONS, Christopher Manes looks at the history of our obsession, showing how the human relationship to the rest of the animal kingdom has been a dynamic religious force in every culture, in every age, and continues to be as important today in cultivating a rich spiritual life as it was among our ancestors.

We live, however, in a state of semi-denial about the role animals play in religious history. A Saint Bernard, despite its name and however much we love dogs, is not exactly welcome in church. Neither is any dog, cat, sheep, bovine, terrapin, or bird. This prohibition stands as a metaphor for how modern religions have banished the animal kingdom from their rituals and discourse, so much so that the animal and the spiritual are now thought of as polar opposites.

Yet just beneath the surface of our abstract religious traditions lies a lush panoply of animal archetypes, a spiritual bestiary in which Satan appears as a serpent, Jesus is the Lamb of God, and the Holy Spirit is a dove. Our cathedrals teem with stone eagles, stags, and other symbolic fauna. Our deepest moral ideas find expression through animal stories like Aesop's fables, the Buddhist Jataka, and Orwell's Animal Farm. At the prehistoric heart of humanity's attempts to articulate spiritual sentiments, we enter the caves of Lascaux to see images not of white-robed deities, but of the giant beasts of the Ice Age.

Christopher Manes's thought-provoking OTHER CREATIONS uncovers this tradition as it flourished in the past and as it lives on today. In this fascinating study, unlike any yet published, Manes shows how animals embodied our first attempts to express the mysteries of faith, and how they continue to do so today. He explores the disturbing question of how our spiritual lives will fare in a culture that increasingly displaces real animals with mere images, where the spectacle of nature films and zoos is replacing the actual contact with animals especially wild animals that once formed the core of our religious sense. Drawing on both his literary scholarship and his personal search for a deeper experience of spirituality, Manes demonstrates that animals do not simply decorate our religious lives; they are part of the very texture of human spirituality.

Christopher Manes is the author of Green Rage, a book about the radical environmental movement, which was nominated for a Los Angeles Times Book Award in science. He is a Ph.D. candidate in medieval literature at the University of Oregon, and a former Fulbright scholar in Iceland, where he studied Old Norse literature. He is also an attorney with a law degree from the University of California at Berkeley. His many articles on environmental philosophy have been widely anthologized, and have had a growing influence on the interdisciplinary study of religion and environmentalism.