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Coming Home to the Wild Coming Home to the Wild Florence R. Shepard Abstract—Paul Shepard’s book “Coming Home to the Pleistocene” seasons, hunted accessible small animals, and scavenged (Shepard 1998), written during the last months of his life, is like a large dead bodies. Paul insisted that our most prized mirror held before us “thinking animals” that reflects our primal cognitive skills (that we wrongly attribute to the influence human being. This image (if comprehended and lived fully, Paul of civilization)—the ability to think and plan ahead, to counseled) can make us at home on planet Earth, rather than match our intellect with others in collaboration, to synthe- ecological misfits. We recognize this image, for at the heart of size many bits of information in appraising situations, to our identity is a fundamentally wild being, one who finds in the read signs, to create symbols that convey information, to whole of wild nature all that is true and beautiful in this world. design beautiful artistic expressions, to find joy in music and celebration and communion, to solve insurmountable obstacles through the use of cunning, and to relate exist- ence to the cosmos and acknowledge the spirit world—were In his address at the 5th World Wilderness Congress in not the legacy of civilization but were bequeathed us by our 1993, Paul Shepard (1998) put forth more assertively hunter-gatherer forebears. than ever before an idea he had been tracking for years. We But our cunning has turned against us in these last are, he proclaimed, wild to the core. Furthermore, our self- 10,000 years as we have over-stepped our human bounds consciousness and world view are based not on the teach- and ignored the “limits of the natural order” (Turner 1998). ings of civilization but rather on the biological legacy as We have changed the face of the earth more rapidly and well as the cultural influences passed on from our ancestors, more destructively than any meteoric catastrophe; our the Pleistocene hunter-gatherers. mindless exploitation of the Earth’s limited resources has He elaborated further that our genome, the genetic placed this planet in an ecological crisis since the turn of inheritance that identifies us as humans, has remained this century. relatively unchanged for the past 10,000 years. When we These changes came about as the result of two concomi- walked out of the Pleistocene we were essentially the same tant movements—through the domestication of plants and beings as we are today. In fact, because of the slow muta- animals and the sedentary life that agriculture promul- tion rate of genes in humans, our genome is essentially as gated as well as through pastoralism, the keeping of herds it was 100,000 years ago when ancestral humans roamed that created the conditions for ownership and surplus and the earth. And that genome, in turn, was the culmination of scarcity that stratified humans into classes. And with the the evolutionary change in still more ancient primate an- horse and its harnessed power came the capacity for invad- cestors whose brain size and body weight increased three- ing and conquering others. fold in the relatively short span of 2,000,000 years. We are, Along with these changes in lifestyle arose a different for the most part, he insisted, the same creatures who came spirituality. Mounted powerfully on prancing steeds, we down out of the trees on the forest edges, placed our feet turned our eyes and hearts away from the spiritual and firmly on the ground, looked around in an innately suspi- ecological sustenance of the earth and looked skyward for cious primate fashion, and began the game of chasing and a god, or gods, to save us from an earthly existence. We being chased. began to see life not as a seamless intertwining of past and Much smaller than the large carnivores, we developed present, but as a linear set of chronological events begin- the acumen to watch predators and prey around us, for we ning in the past, coming to the present, and leading on to the were both, and we learned from our adept fellow creatures. future. This life was not enough to satisfy us; we wanted Animals became our teachers, shaped our perception and paradise and immortality. We abandoned the wisdom of cognition, and gave us the basis for music, dance, ceremony, our own instincts, denied death as a part of the ever- and language. renewing cycle of life, and in the end, rejected the numinous From the beginning, we were omnivorous and gathered Earth as the source of life in favor of a material world where what was plentiful to eat, understood the phenology of the we were supreme, rational beings. Although during the first two decades of his adulthood, In: Watson, Alan E.; Aplet, Greg H.; Hendee, John C., comps. 2000. Paul Shepard lived an optimistic, tempestuous life of envi- Personal, societal, and ecological values of wilderness: Sixth World Wilder- ronmental activism, this turning away from the wisdom of ness Congress proceedings on research, management, and allocation, volume II; 1998 October 24–29; Bangalore, India. Proc. RMRS-P-14. Ogden, UT: U.S. the Earth worried Paul in his later years. In the early 1970’s, Department of Agriculture, Forest Service, Rocky Mountain Research Station. he “became disillusioned with the environmental Florence R. Shepard is Professor Emerita at the University of Utah, movement…and no longer believed that understanding the an essayist and author of “Ecotone” (Albany, NY: State University of New York Press, 1994), widow of the late Paul Shepard, and editor of meaning of ecology would make any difference in turning “Coming Home to the Pleistocene,” 223 4th Ave., Salt Lake City, UT 84103 the public’s consumptive mind to a more sustainable U.S.A. e-mail: F.R.Shepard@ m.cc.utah.edu. All ideas presented, unless specifically attributed to others, have been taken or paraphrased from economy” (Shepard 1998). At that time he began looking Paul Shepard’s final book, “Coming Home to the Pleistocene” ( Washington, deeper into the origins of our problems, and in his writing DC: Island Press, 1998). presented what some think was a prophetic and visionary USDA Forest Service Proceedings RMRS-P-14. 2000 95 message. This thoughtful enterprise led him to explain establishes a dichotomy of places and banishes wild forms Western perceptions of ecology, animals as the language of to enclaves where they are encountered by audiences while nature, and the ontological (developmental) framework of the business of domesticating and denuding the planet the human life cycle. Through his research he became proceeds unabated. firmly bonded to the ancient hunter-gatherers and dreamed In a closing statement of his last book, Paul declared of a time when there was no distinction between the wild his own “primal closure.” “We go back,” he said, “with each and the tame. This thinking led him to discern the differ- day…with the rising and setting of the sun, each turning ences between the two concepts of wildness and wilderness. of the globe…to forms of earlier generations…we cannot Wildness, he said, is the state of our genome, our evolved avoid the inherent and essential demands of an ancient, genetic endowment that has been honed by evolution over repetitive pattern” (Shepard 1998). He implored us to millions of years. Like other uncontrolled creatures on return to the integrity of our genes, to trust them and follow Earth, he maintained, we are a wild species because our their lead, and to acknowledge our ontogeny (the biological genome has not been altered with certain ends in mind as pattern of growth and development during our life cycle) have the genomes of domesticated plants and animals that we inherited from our primal ancestors. that we have manipulated for our own purposes. Paul Our life-long development brings with it physical agreed with philosopher Holmes Rolston who said that changes that occur rapidly during the first years of life, wildness is not just something “behind” and separated from and with these changes come differing psycho-social re- ourselves, but is the “generating matrix” for what we are sponses. To these changes within each of us, however, there (Rolston 1983). Although we have taught each other social must be appropriate responses in the culture to mitigate our and cultural conventions in order to live together, and neoteny. Neoteny is that strange immaturity retained by although we are creatures that can adapt to deficient en- humans throughout our life cycle that makes us dependent vironments, we are more at peace, less stressed, and more on others and on the culture for help and support our whole sane in environments that resemble the ones in which we lives through as we confront critical life passages. evolved. That primal landscape, he reminded us, is still Young children require the firm nurturing of loving etched on our brains and is recognizable and familiar to us. caregivers, but as they grow and become more self-sufficient Without it, he insisted, we are ecological misfits and often they increasingly need opportunities for exploration in na- physical and mental wrecks. ture. Their cognitive development begins with the tax- Wilderness, on the other hand, is both a cognitive con- onomy of animals, who are like us and yet so different, who struction and a place we have dedicated to wildness that provide not only the basis for language categories but the provides the optimal conditions for the wild genome’s elabo- psychological basis for otherness, the understanding of dif- ration. We think of it as a place set aside, a realm of ference apart from the self.
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