Paul Shepard

Paul Howe Shepard, Jr.
Born	June 12, 1925 Kansas City, MO
Died	July 27, 1996 (age 71) Salt Lake City, Utah
Occupation	Author, Professor
Nationality	American
Subject	Ecology, Domestication, Ecopsychology
Notable works	The Tender Carnivore and the Sacred Game, Nature and Madness, Coming Home to the Pleistocene, Where we Belong, the Others.
Spouse	Florence Bertagnolli Shepard
Children	Jane Shepard, Marnie Shepard, Kent Shepard

Paul Howe Shepard, Jr. (June 12, 1925 – July 27, 1996) was an American environmentalist and author best known for introducing the " paradigm" to deep ecology. 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, 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, Shepard postulated that many humans in post-agricultural society are often not fully mature, but are trapped in infantilism or an adolescent state.

He died of lung cancer on July 21, 1996 in Salt Lake City.

Shepard was born in Kansas City and 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. From 1973 until his retirement in 1994 he taught at Pitzer College and Claremont Graduate University.

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