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III. THE PALEOLITHIC AT SMITH COLLEGE

A colleague once defined an academic discipline as a group of scholars who had agreed not to ask certain embarrassing questions about key assumptions.

—MARK NATHAN COHEN, GOOD CALORIES, BAD CALORIES, 2007

IT’S NOT THAT I wanted to go to Smith College. It was more like it was something that happened to me. No question: according to going opinion in Cleveland, I was to “go east” where the Ivy League and Seven Sisters colleges were. That much was clear. My idea was the far groovier Sarah Lawrence College north of New York City. My brother Sandy—who was into the likes of Nina Simone, Summerhill, and Segovia before anyone else I knew had ever heard of them—had told me that at Sarah Lawrence an aspiring opera singer would appear unannounced on the balcony of the dorm and belt out an aria. The problem was, I didn’t get in. The head mistress of my preparatory high school had gone to Smith and reveled in sending her students to follow in her learned footsteps. So there I was in 1965—a Smithy by somebody else’s design.

Students at Smith College, Northampton, Massachusetts, 1964. Courtesy College Archives, Smith College.

The campus was very much like it had been for the previous fifty years. Students in saddle shoes, kilts, and round-collar blouses bought at Bonwit Teller and Neiman Marcus. Field hockey and rowing. Tea in the living room, bridge in the sitting room. Mixers at Yale. Not allowed to stay out past 11 p.m. People of color few and far between. Lesbians hidden away in the obscurity of their dorm closets.

But my reference to the “Paleolithic” is not a satirical comment about Smith’s traditions or student culture. It’s about what I studied there.

Paul Shepard’s typewriter. Photo credit and courtesy of Anthony Wheeler.

PAUL SHEPARD: SUBVERSIVE ANIMAL

(1925–1996)

The genetic human in us knows how to dance the animal, knows the strength of clan membership and the profound claims and liberation of daily rites of thanksgiving

—P.S., THE ONLY WORLD WE’ VE GOT, 1996

Paul Shepard dashed into the biology lab in a flurry, the stack of papers in his arms flying up and hitting his blond beard. With such unselfconscious actions, he let us see that he had another life outside the academic domain of microscopes and reptile brains. Little did I know that this absent-minded professor was a genius and a soon-to-become maverick innovator in his field. Perhaps his unfolding as a subversive could have been predicted by the fact that, unlike any biology teacher in high school, he spoke of a little-known area of study called “ecology.” But, really, who cared? Biology existed in my life only to fulfill a requirement before I could get on to courses in my major, and my major was definitely not biology.

I had no idea, though, that down the line Paul Shepard was to have a major impact on my life’s work. At that very moment in 1966 when I took his biology course, he was in fact working on a book called Man in the Landscape that he punched out on his portable Olivetti Lettera 32. The book would lay the ground for his life’s work, while I was just striving to get through the formaldehyde session with the dead frog.

I never saw Professor Shepard again after that semester at Smith College, but some twenty years later I came across his name as the teacher of a workshop in a California Institute of Integral Studies catalog. He was giving a weekend class on animal totems, and the announcement for it sat on the exact opposite page from a session I was offering. Thus began our correspondence—and ultimately his wife Flo’s unexpected and most welcome gift to me: the very Olivetti Paul had used to type his books.

Simply put, the gist of Paul Shepard’s work is that humans are animals who belong in the natural world just as giraffes and fireflies and manatees do. Whether looked at from the perspective of ecology, psychology, culture, politics, or health, our severance from the world shared by all the other creatures has been a failure. His next book, The Subversive Science, introduced the field of ecology, revealing its parameters and prescient of its implications for the survival of life in a world headed toward human-made catastrophe. That same year, 1969, he received a Guggenheim to do ethnographic research on the cultures of hunter-gatherer peoples, studies that would expose the disparities between the looming disaster of civilization and the manner in which our ancestors had survived successfully for more than a million years. Although he had hunted as a child in Missouri, he went on his first bear hunt in 1978; the bear was to become his personal totem and a lifelong fascination. By that time he’d already published Environ/mental, The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, and Thinking Animals.

Then, in 1979, Paul was appointed a Fellow at the Rockefeller Foundation to write the book that would draw the most attention and create a dedicated group of followers: Nature and Madness. I confess to being a member of the fellowship of folks trying to understand why we humans are the way we are. I am also a member of a very specific sub-fellowship of such travelers: the all-out, gung-ho Shepard enthusiasts. In this book he traces the psycho-historical development of humans from the Paleolithic era through the desert cultures of the Middle East. All the while, he is revealing the injuries to/adaptations of psyche that produced the distortions hailed and promoted by Western civilization. By contrast, he creates a model for understanding the role of the natural world in healthy psychological development. Based on the fact that humans came to be humans over the course of the 99 percent of our existence in which we lived wholly in the natural world, by evolution itself we are dependent on immersion in nature for our psychic/emotional maturation. He goes one step farther: he proposes that societies coming after the invention of sedentary agriculture do not provide that innate and expected immersion, and so many of those born into them become stuck in infantile or adolescent stages of growth.

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 my office, a luscious July breeze blowing in through the door, alternately reading the book and dropping it in my lap to breathe.”

A few years later, at a writers conference in Prescott, Arizona, I met Flo Shepard, the woman with whom he had built a wilderness cabin in Wyoming, edited anthologies, and shared that last rich decade of his life. Shortly thereafter I received a letter from her asking if I might like to steward the Olivetti he had used to write his books. Amazingly, it arrived amid crushed newspapers and bubble wrap, a rickety little machine that looked wholly incapable of translating all those enormous thoughts into mere words. I held it in my hands, trying to take in the sagacity and panoramic vista it was still emanating.