Man in the Landscape: A Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature

FOREWORD

Foreword ONE NIGHT IN AFRICA, we came upon a leopard just after she had killed an impala. Wewatched as she carried her prey up twenty-five feet to the crook of a tree. Her muzzlewas pink from warm blood. She wasthe most beautiful creature I had ever seen; I wasin the most wonderful moment of my life. Paul Shepard would have understood. The leopard wasnot a figment of my imagination; ahh, but the leopard fueled my thoughts. And does to thisday. For thirtyyears, I have been in the thick of the conservation movement.Through those decades, I have been inspired by the genius of Paul Shepard, who is to my mind the most important thinker of our time. I stumbled onto him at the beginning of my conservation life in 1971 by reading his anthology with Daniel McKinley The Subversive Science: Essays toward an Ecology of Man. Paul Shepard's introduction caught my fancy: "The rejection of animality is a rejection of nature as a whole."1 Aha, thought I, another who understands we are animals! Over the next decade, as his books—The Tender Carnivore and theSacred Game, Thinking Animals, and Nature and Madness—came out, I gobbled them up like sizzlingelk steaks. Paul Shepard's lifelong quest was to answer the thoroughly practical and urgent question, "Whydo men persist in destroying their habitat?"2 He wentdeeper than anyone before in seeking an answer: "Anuncanny something seems to block the corrective will, not simply private cupidity or political inertia."3 His answer was that agriculture, pastoralism, and ( x) Foreword civilization had progressivelycut us off from nature, which led to the failed maturityof individuals and then to the madness of society. He wrote that "wehave, in the course of a few thousand years, alienated ourselves from our only home, planet Earth, our only time, the Pleistocene, and our only companions , our fellow creatures."4 This answer is deeply radical in that it goes against the self-love of civilization, the arrogance of humanism, and the idea of progress. Its truth gleams like a cat's tooth. In their forewords,respectively,of Thinking Animals and The Tender Carnivore and theSacred Game,Max Oelschlaeger and George Sessionsshow how powerful Shepard's mark has been on ecological philosophy and on our understanding of the root of the current ecological crisis.I am thankful that I need not tackle such things. My task is to suggest whyliterate people should read Man in the Landscape, arguably the toughest book in Shepard's string. His books are demanding. They aren't nature fluff. Ultimately, however, Shepard is challenging to read because most people—nature lovers included—can't handle the truth. Shepard continued the DarwinianRevolution by creating the discipline of human ecology—looking at human beings and their relationship with the land from an ecological point of view. In doing so, he blew away the myth of human exceptionalism—that humans are not really biological —and offended our humanistic hubris. To convince you to read Man in theLandscape, let's consider my theory of why Paul Shepard wasable to see soclearly that our emperor (agriculture-based civilization) wore no clothes. What helped make Paul Shepard the fearless slayerof comforting myths? To be sure, his stabbing intellect and rigorous scholarship were central to that quest, but I believe that three factors in Shepard's early experience helped prepare him to recognize and articulate that our species isfundamentally part of the Pleistocene—to blow the whistle on agriculture andcivilization. First, unlike manyacademicswho havewrestledwith the human/nature problem, Shepard was an outdoorsman and conservationist before he ever went to graduate school. In the Foreword ( xi) years immediately following World War II, Shepard did his undergraduate workin wildlife conservation at the University of Missouri—where Aldo Leopold's Game Management was the text. Before going to graduate school at Yale in 1950, he worked for the Missouri Conservation Federation for a year. He wasa hunter and a fisherman, an egg collector and a butterfly netter. During graduate school and as a young professor , he wasconservation chairman of the National Council of Garden Clubs (a major conservation player in those days) and worked as a seasonal naturalist for the National Park Service in Glacier, Crater Lake, and Olympic National Parks. During the 1950s and early 1960s, the modern conservation movementwasforged in the fire of successful campaigns against the proposed Echo Park Dam in Dinosaur National Monument and for passage...