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Nature and Madness

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Paul Shepard is the seminal thinker/writer in the field of human ecology. His works have been widely influential and caused some distress amongst environmental groups. This work was originally published by Sierra Club books, but withdrawn in two years because of the controversial ideas.

In this, the final volume of a trilogy (The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game and Thinking Animals being the first two) he furthers his thesis that seperation from our pleistocene past has caused a modern disjunction with nature and may be the most important cause of modern problems.

His indictment of history; "(history) is itself a Western invention whose central theme is the rejection of habitat. It formulates experience outside of nature and tends to reduce place to location.... It seeks causality in the conscious, spiritual, ambitious character of men and memorializes them in writing" (page 47), is one aspect of Shepard's view that modern human culture is pathological.

Paul Shepard is not easy to read. His ideas are unsettling and his writing style is dense at times. However, it seems that he is a philosopher who will influence thinking not only about nature and human relationships with nature, but about society and "progress."

"Nature and Madness" will upset your view of the world you live in, which is probably the main reason for reading it.

For those interested in studies of western culture's destructive relationship with nature, this treatise from Paul Shepard is certainly a rewarding read, though I recommend it with some reservations. Shepard starts with the Mother Earth concept and takes it to great psychological lengths, then applies this psychology to all of mankind. It's certainly a radical thesis, but it's worth thinking about. In what he calls variously ontogenetic regression, unaltered immaturity, and other labels, Shepard makes the case that humans have been torn from their true mother, the Earth, as the unfortunate outcome of modern civilization and social constructs. Thus, society behaves in pathological ways similar to what can be seen from children who are torn away from their mothers before the onset of maturity. Therefore, our society's attitude toward nature is perpetually immature, underdeveloped, and undernourished, with all the destructiveness and disrespect that results from such a dysfunctional childhood.

While this thesis has its various strengths and weaknesses that can be discovered by the reader, there's not enough meat to it to round out an entire book, even a very short one like this. Shepard's most glaring weakness is in psychology, as he offers little more than extremely basic Freud (with the associated sexism and dubious ideas on infancy and childhood), and then makes unconvincing attempts to extend this psychology to society as a whole. Meanwhile, Shepard's writing gets buried in academic dogma that is a real slog for non-professors who don't speak in non-stop technical jargon all day. Watch for arcane terms like methectic, kerygmatic, neoteny, or autochthonous; along with brain-drain sentences like "...amputate and cauterize pubertal epigenesis because they would further transform the relationship of the infant to its mother." Add all this to Shepard's rather self-righteous speculations and you are in for an exasperating read, although the basic thesis of this book definitely offers food for thought.

I am a big Paul Shepard fan but this book was a disappointment. The book starts off well investigating the thesis that natural selection has left the human mind with a set series of developmental events that must take place between childhood and adulthood by which the child comes to understand its place in both the human community and the natural world. This sequence was built into human psychology during hundred of thousands of years of living as hunter-gatherers. When we adopted large-scale agriculture a mere 10.000 years ago this sequence was radically disrupted as the sphere of the childs interaction with both the naturl world around it and it human community was contracted drastically. Many of the ills of modern life stem from this disruption.
Shepard presentation of his basic thesis is compelling. But he then goes on to psycho-historical explorations of how this disruption takes different shapes in different historical epochs. This constitutes the bulk of the book. The psycho-history pieces I found unsatisfying, full of very broad generalizations about the psychological effect of various cultural trends. There is no way to tell what is just psychobabble and what is not. If you are new to Shepard I would recommend the Tender Carnivore instead, or for a nice summary of his whole line of thought Coming Home to the Pleistocene.

This is one of several brilliant books that Paul Shepard has written which compels the careful reader to strongly reconsider how that last 10,000 years of cultural and behavioral change have impacted an otherwise healthy human psychological unfolding (ontogeny). For most people, some basic math is a requisite to appreciating the profound insights of this book. Humans in their modern physical form lived as hunters and gatherers in nomadic tribal groups for 190,000 years, then began farming, settling down, and dramatically altering the normal ontogeny just in the last 10,000 years. The last 5% of our history should never be appraised without consideration of the other 95%, something which this author understands. Shepard writing combines a scholarly erudition with a poetic and mythic literary style. This guys rocks!

One of the most compelling expositions on the subject in the ecological literature genre, this is a powerful work. Explaining in passionate detail, Shepard observes how the further human culture draws away from the nurturance of the natural world, the more pathological it becomes. If there are any doubts, just look at us!

While dense and obscure at times, a careful and patient reading illuminates truths in the clearest light possible. These may not be what we want to hear, but they certainly are what we must learn if we are to thrive with a measure of vibrant health and spirit.

Bernie Krause, PhD

Paul Shepard wrote Nature and Madness to explore a perplexing question: "Why do men persist in destroying their habitat?" Shepard came to the conclusion that modern European-American culture was the damaged offspring of a long process of psychological deterioration.

Obviously, modern consumers live and think in a manner that is radically different from our wild ancestors who lived relatively sustainably. This change wasn't the result of freaky genetic mutations or the normal process of evolution. We still have Pleistocene genes. Newborns are still wild animals who are ready and anxious to enjoy a good life among a clan of buffalo hunters.

It wasn't genes that changed us, it was culture. Culture is a tribe's software, and cultural evolution can happen a million times faster than genetic evolution -- and that's exactly what happened. Few, if any, newborns are now born into wild, free, salmon eating cultures. Alas, most are condemned to spend their days in the most destructive culture yet devised. Poor babies!

The process that leads to the development of healthy, happy, well-adjusted wild humans is a spiral stairway, based on a calendar. There are time windows in which certain steps in the process can be completed. If you've ever read the story of Amala and Kamala, the wolf-girls of India, you know that they missed developmental windows for learning how to speak, and walking upright. Missed windows lead to incomplete development.

Shepard thought that modern consumers were the offspring of an incomplete developmental process. We were immature, infantile, psychologically crippled. By Paleolithic standards, we were childish adults, suffering from arrested development. He discussed our downward spiral by presenting us with four snapshots.

First, the domestication of plants and animals blindsided the human journey. We no longer lived in a wild land. We lived in farm country, an artificial human-controlled ecosystem. Regular contact with wild animals had been an essential part of our psychological development process. But farmers erased our wild teachers and replaced them with what Shepard referred to as a horde of goofies -- passive, submissive, dim-witted domesticated animals. We ceased venerating the sacred totemic spirits of the land, and replaced them with a human-like Earth Mother, who sometimes fed us generously, and sometimes didn't. We abandoned the leisurely lifestyle of nomadic foraging, and replaced it with miserable backbreaking toil that destroyed the health of both the farmer and the land.

Next came the desert fathers, patriarchal nomadic herders who pushed Earth Mother out of the temple, and replaced her with a powerful, aggressive, authoritarian Sky Father. He sired three monotheistic religions: Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. Monotheism was a fountain of world-rejecting asceticism which "tore up the human psyche by its most ancient roots," according to Shepard. "The `cradle of civilization' is also the cradle of fanatic ideology -- witness the interminable desert wars..."

Next came the Reformation. The Protestant fathers were fascinated, obsessed, and disgusted by sex, filth, corruption, sensuality, the natural world -- life itself. The puritan path led to estrangement from the body and the world. It increased the attention paid to sin and evil.

Finally, he discussed the mechanists of industrial society. They mostly spent their lives indoors in vast manmade urban environments that were densely populated by huge numbers of strangers. Cities were breeding grounds for myriads of psychological problems. The city was "the wilderness in disarray, a kind of pandemonium," a realm of "menacing disintegration."

Many of us are coming to comprehend that it is remarkably unclever to continue destroying our habitat. Shepard spent years constructing his controversial explanation. Whether or not you buy every argument, the primary thrust of the book is the rather obvious notion that our civilization has lost its marbles. This realization is a mandatory step for any pilgrimage in search of healing, happiness, and sustainability. We must abandon the belief that we are enjoying the zenith of the amazing human journey, because it locks us into a cage -- there is no problem to fix, everything is always getting better.

Human beings thrived as salmon eaters and buffalo hunters. We were healthy, whole, and happy when we lived in wild tribes in wild ecosystems. Prince Charles wrote a line I will never forget: "In so many ways we are what we are surrounded by, in the same way as we are what we eat." It's heartbreaking to watch insane zoo lions endlessly pacing back and forth in their concrete prison. Long ago I read an article about condors. It said that a wild and free condor soaring above the mountains was sacred, majestic, perfect. But a condor held captive in a zoo was less -- far less. The essay concluded that condor-ness consisted of 10% condor and 90% place.

After a thorough examination of the process of our decline, Shepard served us a solution that barely covers more than a page. In terms of our human-ness, we still have the 10% human component -- our genes. What we're missing is the 90% place. Therefore, Shepard says, the solution is to raise our children in a manner similar to Neolithic society, in a wild ecosystem, so that they can fully experience a complete, normal, and healthy development process. I was shocked when I first read this ridiculous and naïve idea. But later, I realized that he was exactly correct. It's a perfect and brilliant solution, but it requires huge change. Shepard pointed to the destination. It's up to us to find the route.

Warning! This book is written for gray-haired professors, not a general audience. Nature and Madness is the opposite of easy to read. Two beautiful and easy-to-read books that explore psychological development are The Continuum Concept by Jean Liedloff, and The Human Cycle by Colin Turnbull.

Richard Adrian Reese
Author of What Is Sustainable