I’m not such a great reader myself, so no need to apologize there. But even a book read slowly and from the beginning can be forgotten — which is good if it’s a novel and you want to read it again, but not so great if it’s nonfiction.

I keep wanting to spell Shepard’s name Shepherd — which he would’ve hated, I’m sure! Did he really invent the term “resourcism”? I forgot. I use that a lot.

Deer numbers have been declining here, too. This year I think many of the hunters won’t fill their tags. Some folks are suggesting the failure of the acorn crop last year led to fewer fawns being born this past spring.

this year’s garden
unfenced
between the deer and the
never-ending rain
saw a harvest of nil
even with reduced populations
next year:
a fenced in garden

as for now
it is winter
and I am invigorated
by the demands of the season
I’m hoping for beaucoup snow

Great E.O. Wilson quote. Good points about foraging. I wish I was a better reader. I’d read Wilson if I were.

So you know the Shepard corpus.

Neat to think of your poetic correspondent, Mr. Davis laying in wait up your mythical hill.

Can’t remember having mentioned Mr. Gasset earlier. I’m really surprised that essay isn’t on-line. Maybe it is on-line but not in English. I’d like to actually read it.

I’ve had a chance to peek at a more of Mr. Shepard. A very interesting person outside of his intellectual life, as a seasonal park employee he created an imbroglio which brought ongoing logging in the Olympic National Park to a halt. In the process he both got himself fired from the park service and alienated members of the green movement. I also wonder if he wasn’t the lead instigator in the idea of nature porn, judging from the succinctness with which he formulates it. And I love his neologism “resourcism”.

I’m so glad you and Mr. Shepard are “friends”. He seems so 70′s to me – I love it! I was fascinated with his support of immanence and essence and the way that it shears off from your own distrust of those ideas. I think he says the rejection of essence is a malady of abstraction.

I’m also struck by my vacillation from devastation at your posting of the condor(?) windmill kill to my hearty embrace of Pleistocene hunting mechanics.

Funny you should start by referencing Rick Bass, whom I just saw at Penn State Altoona the week before last. An excellent reader and speaker, by the way — well worth going out of your way to see. I’m not familiar with the essay you mention, but the guy who invited Bass to come read — the poet Todd Davis — is hunting in the woods on the other side of the field right now. I can see his pickup truck from my window.

Haven’t heard of David Peterson; I appreciate your sharing those quotes. The Sun has always been a pretty provocative magazine.

Back in 2005 I posted some quotes by E.O. Wilson and Need Noss, excerpted from essays in which they speculated on the importance of our hunter-gatherer evolutionary heritage to the way we see the world. Wilson:

The [human] brain evolved into its present form over a period of about two million years, from the time of Homo habilis to the late Stone Age of Homo sapiens, during which people existed in hunter-gatherer bands in intimate contact with the natural environment. Snakes mattered. The smell of water, the hum of a bee, the directional bend of a stalk mattered. The naturalist’s trance was adaptive: the glimpse of one small animal hidden in the grass could make the difference between eating and going hungry in the evening. And a sweet sense of horror, the shivery fascination with monsters and creeping forms that so delights us today even in the sterile hearts of the cities, could keep you alive until the next morning. Organisms are the natural stuff of metaphor and ritual. Although the evidence is far from all in, the brain appears to have kept all its old capacities, its channeled quickness. We stay alert and alive in the vanished forests of the world.

Paul Shepherd has been a big influence on my thinking. I’ve read The Others: How Animals Made Us Human and Nature and Madness. It’s rare to find a philosopher with an in-depth knowledge of ecology and anthropology. The main problems I have with his thinking are his tendency to overvalue hunting to the virtual exclusion of gathering — which after all is responsible for at least 75% of the diet in contemporary hunting-gathering peoples — and his tendency to romanticize the Paleolithic. I do feel that the evidence is very strong now that human hunters caused the great megafauna extinctions, a view first championed by Paul Martin, as you say. Once we left Africa, we found these wandering bonanzas of meat that didn’t know how dangerous we were or how to avoid us, not having evolved with us. And yeah, it can be spooky to find out about all the plants and ecosystems today that are still showing the effects of the loss of megafauna species as browsers or seed dispersers. It wasn’t really that long ago — the blink of an eye.

I remember your referencing that Ortega y Gasset essay in a previous discussion here, but I admit I haven’t tracked it down yet.

Now Dave, where’s the beer?

There’s also an essay of Bass’ on line, Why I Hunt: Each year during such pursuits, I am struck more and more by the conceit that people in a hunter-gatherer culture might have richer imaginations than those who dwell more fully in an agricultural or even post-agricultural environment. What else is the hunt but a stirring of the imagination, with the quarry, or goal, or treasure lying just around the corner or over the next rise? A hunter’s imagination has no choice but to become deeply engaged, for it is never the hunter who is in control, but always the hunted, in that the prey directs the predator’s movements.

David Petersen also writes from the perspective of a hunter. He gives a long and interesting interview in the latest Sun magazine. He rails at high-grading deer populations and recommends more doe tags (meat hunting, not antler hunting). I’ll transcribe a portion: Interviewer: Carl Sagan said,”A sharp distinction between humans and ‘animals’ is essential if we are to bend them to our will — wear them, eat them — without any disquieting tinges of guilt and regret.” How do you respond to that? Petersen: Hunting has been around longer than the distinction he’s referring to. For hundreds of millennia prior to the advent of agriculture — which reduced wild animals, via domestication, to soulless “property” — our human forebears hunted, killed, and ate animals, just as animals hunted, killed, and ate them. Throughout all that formative time — a time that made us what we are now, both good and bad — humans everywhere on earth had an animistic spirituality in which animals were not lesser beings but equals. The only difference was in “job description”. Hunter-gatherers believed — and the few tribal societies that survive unblemished by agriculture or missionary invasion still believe — that prey “willingly” give themselves to right-minded predators for consumption. But they just as strongly believe that our duty, our debt of reciprocity, was to honor and respect the animals who gave their lives and whose lives are taken. This animistic spirituality, in my view, provides the highest moral guidance as to how we should relate to animals. But with the spread of agriculture and domestication, animism was replaced by increasingly human centered dogmas that conveniently put us on a higher plane than “soulless” animals.

Sorry about all that, Dave! In this cold time of year I think on our historical dependence on animals. I think of the many tens (or hundreds) of thousands of years of the chilly Pleistocene when no human in Europe could have made it through the winter had they not lived in the skins of animals. We’ve no respect for animals, to whom we owe everything. We call them livestock. We call them game. It’s we who are the dependents, but being as we are, we’re really good at ignoring the reality of the situation. Personally I can’t think of a higher calling than to be prey. What’s up with that lamb of god, sheep in the fold stuff anyway?

Rereading the Peterson interview I came across Paul Shepard, whose book, Coming Home to the Pleistocene sounds very tasty. From the Powell’s review: (It is Shepard’s) guiding theme, the central tenet of his thought: that our essential human nature is a product of our genetic heritage, formed through thousands of years of evolution during the Pleistocene epoch, and that the current subversion of that Pleistocene heritage lies at the heart of today’s ecological and social ills. Petersen, the hunter, quotes Shepard as a reliable authority that the late Pleistocene megafauna extinctions where due to climate change, not human predation. That sounds awfully convenient to one with a hunter’s perspective. In the years since Shepard’s death in 1996, Paul Martin has made a pretty good case for anthropogenic extinctions.

I’ve found Shepard’s “Coming Home to the Pleistocene on Google books and it looks very tasty, at least in precis. He’s a small town Missouri boy raised with the run of the woods. In the contents a section is described which explores “how we got so smart”. He attributes our smarts to our interaction with prey animals, “participating in complex, competitive strategies that brought with them the ability to think ahead, consider our actions and develop the capacity for metaphor” (Capacity for metaphor — my word!) He sounds just like Bass, and like Petersen, both of whom must be derivative of him. Sheperd seems to be a fascinating thinker, but I was little worried to see Norman O. Brown’s name come up so quickly in the short except I read on Amazon. I rubbed up against Brown’s “Love’s Body” years ago. It had great appeal but was too crazy for one who was already a little too crazy. I remember a very long discursion on the equivalence of money and shit and way too much Freud. Living at home as a twenty-something and I certainly didn’t want to read about incest with my mother on any terms. The google turns up this characteristic Brown fragment: in orgasm, all the splendor and misery of representative government (http://bit.ly/7Lbr5l). I’ll have to take another look at that book.

Thanks, Dave, once again for turning my wheels. I’ve been fascinated with the mythic, hidden Pleistocene for years. I’ve loved how Paul Martin said that we can’t understand what’s around us until we are aware of all that has so recently disappeared in extinction. Paying attention, as you do, to the animals and plants that are present is only sensible, they’re all we’ve got. Maybe you know of Shepard cause he sounds an awful lot like you. In the contents of “Coming Home” he outlines section VI: “Romancing the Potato (What fun language!)
The idealism of domestication is like other ideologies that have arisen in history — a blanket repudiation of anything prehistoric except as the concrete model of inferiority. Agrarian power and domestication of plants and animals brought consequences that were not only practical but also profoundly psychotic for all succeeding generations.

Now if only Ortega y Gasset’s “Meditations on Hunting” were available on-line. No worries though. The larder’s full, thanks to Shepard’s “Coming Home” hanging heavy on the Google meat rack. Hey! – a hunting metaphor. And after that “Love’s Body” awaits. I’m so effin’ rich!