Encounters with Nature: Essays By Paul Shepard

Paul Shepard, an ecologist and writer who died in 1996, explored several themes in the course of a dozen-odd books that examine humanity's relationship with the natural world. One of them was the role of wildlife, and especially of large predators, in the shaping of the human intelligence; our language, he observes, is shot through with metaphorical references to animals that recognize those creatures as "the middle ground between us and the nonliving world." Another common theme is the profoundly dislocating psychic effects that industrial culture's divorce from nature have had on us all. The destruction of identity, the refusal to recognize our animal selves has, Shepard believed, fueled all manner of neuroses and psychoses at the individual and group levels.

Encounters with Nature, a gathering of essays either unpublished, delivered as lectures, or issued in obscure academic journals, reiterates these themes. Some of Shepard's essays offer a defense of hunting, an activity that, he believed, "may benefit the stability of the natural community" and that connects its practitioners to the rhythms of life and death; controversial at the time they were written, these pieces can still provoke considerable debate. Other essays examine the place of animals such as wolves and, particularly, bears in the ecological imagination. All are joined by a common sensibility, one that insists that we can reverse our course and undo some of the damage we have wrought on the natural world. "The development of a mature identity," he writes, "inevitably reaches out to all things, to the growth of an organic relationship in thought as well as fact." Shepard's determined defense of the wild--by which he means the community of all species--offers food for thought with every page. --Gregory McNamee