Background
Mr. Shepard was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, on June 12, 1925.
Mr. Shepard was born in Kansas City, Missouri, United States, on June 12, 1925.
Paul Shepard earned his bachelor's degree from the University of Missouri. He went on to earn a doctorate from Yale, and his 1967 book Man in the Landscape: a Historic View of the Esthetics of Nature was based on his thesis.
He lectured and taught biology at Knox College, Smith College, Dartmouth College, and Claremont College in a career that spanned more than 40 years. From 1973 until his retirement in 1994 he taught at Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University.
Professor Shepard was an author and also a co-author, with Barry Sanders, of "The Sacred Paw: The Bear in Nature, Myth and Literature". His works have attempted to establish a normative framework in terms of evolutionary theory and developmental psychology. He offers a critique of sedentism/civilization and advocates modeling human lifestyles on those of nomadic prehistoric humans. He explores the connections between domestication, language, and cognition.
Based on his early study of modern ethnographic literature examining contemporary nature-based peoples, Mr. Shepard created a developmental model for understanding the role of sustained contact with nature in healthy human psychological development, positing that humans, having spent 99% of their social history in hunting and gathering environments, are therefore evolutionarily dependent on nature for proper emotional and psychological growth and development. Drawing from ideas of neoteny, Paul Shepard postulated that many humans in post-agricultural society are often not fully mature, but are trapped in infantilism or an adolescent state.
His marriages to Melba Wheatcroft and to June Smith Atwater ended in divorce. He was a father of one son, Kenton Howe Shepard, and two daughters, Margaret Winn and Jane Shepard, as well as four stepchildren, Kathryn Morton, Matthew Krall, Lisi Krall, Robert C. Krall. Paul Shepard has four grandchildren, seven step-grandchildren.