The Only World We've Got

Selected by the author from his many books, here in one volume is an overview of a brilliant and controversial career. Paul Shepard has long been revered as an elder of the environmental movement, and now the writings that have won such widespread admiration from his peers are available in a single volume. These powerful selections range provocatively from human ecology to environmental perception to the nature of sanity and our relationships with our fellow animals. Shepard has been an ardent voice crying out for the wilderness, as well as for its non-human inhabitants. We need them, he believes, not to subjugate to human use and productivity, but as elemental teachers who show us the wisdom of the natural world and our appropriate relationship to it. Many of Shepard's conclusions on the ills of society were reached by observing how far we have come from a pre-agrarian time when we participated in the natural order without subverting it to our desires. The writings of Paul Shepard are a fascinating journey along the route back to a healthy future.